Discourse Modeling and Processing Seminar WS2425

Serve as: Teaching Assistant

Teacher: Prof. Dr. Yang Janet Liu, Beiduo Chen

Course Schedule:

Week 1 (14.10) – Introduction & Overview

Week 2 (21.10) – RST 1: Fundamentals, Parsing, Parsing Gneneralization

Week 3 (28.10) – RST 2: Application - Summarization, Workshop - RST & Summarization

Week 4 (04.11) – PDTB 1: Fundamentals, Parsing

Week 5 (11.11) – Cancelled

Week 6 (18.11) – PDTB 2: Application - QADiscourse, Data - GDTB

Week 7 (25.11) – Discourse Signaling

Week 8 (02.12) – QUD 1: Fundamentals

Week 9 (09.12) – QUD 2: Parsing & Evaluation

Week 10 (16.12) – QUD 3: Application - Elaborative Simplification, Workshop: Project Brainstorming

Week 11 (23.12) – Project Proposal Due

Week 12 (13.01) – Project Discussion 1

Week 13 (20.01) – Project Discussion 2

Week 14 (27.01) – Project Presentation

Week 15 (03.02) – Conclusion / Wrap-up + QA

Reading List

• Rhetorical Structure Theory: Toward a functional theory of text organization (Mann and Thompson, 1988)
• bottom-up: Representation Learning for Text-level Discourse Parsing (Ji & Eisenstein, ACL 2014)
• top-down: DMRST: A Joint Framework for Document-Level Multilingual RST Discourse Segmentation and Parsing (Liu et al., CODI 2021)
• Why Can’t Discourse Parsing Generalize? A Thorough Investigation of the Impact of Data Diversity (Liu & Zeldes, EACL 2023)
• The Role of Discourse Units in Near-Extractive Summarization (Li et al., SIGDIAL 2016)
• Extractive Summarisation for German-language Data: A Text-level Approach with Discourse Features (Hewett & Stede, COLING 2022)
• Reflections on the Penn Discourse TreeBank, Comparable Corpora, and Complementary Annotation (Prasad et al., CL 2014)
• discopy: A Neural System for Shallow Discourse Parsing (Knaebel, CODI 2021)
• QADiscourse - Discourse Relations as QA Pairs: Representation, Crowdsourcing and Baselines (Pyatkin et al., EMNLP 2020)
• GDTB: Genre Diverse Data for English Shallow Discourse Parsing across Modalities, Text Types, and Domains (Liu et al., EMNLP 2024)
• A Neural Approach to Discourse Relation Signal Detection (Zeldes and Liu, Dialogue and Discourse 2020)
• Questions Under Discussion: From Sentence to Discourse (Benz & Jasinskaja, 2017)
• Discourse Comprehension: A Question Answering Framework to Represent Sentence Connections (Ko et al., EMNLP 2022)
• Discourse Analysis via Questions and Answers: Parsing Dependency Structures of Questions Under Discussion (Ko et al., Findings 2023)
• QUDeval: The Evaluation of Questions Under Discussion Discourse Parsing (Wu et al., EMNLP 2023)
• Elaborative Simplification as Implicit Questions Under Discussion (Wu et al., EMNLP 2023)

Course Assessment and Final Grading

As described in the first lecture, there are a few major milestones and prerequisites before submitting your final project paper:

• 1-page project propose: this should describe your main research question(s), datasets to use, proposed method(s), group members, and a plan of division of labor etc. This is due on Monday, 23.12.2024. There won’t be a class meeting that day.
• project discussion with instructors: this is to get individual feedback for your proposal from the instructors. This is currently scheduled during the lectures on 13/01/2025 and 20/01/205.
• in-class project presentation: this is to showcase your work to the whole class and get feedback from your peers. WIP is fine. This is currently scheduled during the second-to-last lecture, Monday, 27/01/2025.

The final project paper is due on 17/02/2025. More details to come and will be provided during lectures.