Dr. YANG JANET LIU

Discourse understanding is essential for many NLP tasks, yet most existing work remains constrained by framework-dependent discourse representations. This work investigates whether large language models (LLMs) capture discourse knowledge that generalizes across languages and frameworks. We address this question along two dimensions: (1) developing a unified discourse relation label set to facilitate cross-lingual and cross-framework discourse analysis, and (2) probing LLMs to assess whether they encode generalizable discourse abstractions. Using multilingual discourse relation classification as a testbed, we examine a comprehensive set of 23 LLMs of varying sizes and multilingual capabilities. Our results show that LLMs, especially those with multilingual training corpora, can generalize discourse information across languages and frameworks. Further layer-wise analyses reveal that language generalization at the discourse level is most salient in the intermediate layers. Lastly, our error analysis provides an account of challenging relation classes.

Work on shallow discourse parsing in English has focused on the Wall Street Journal corpus, the only large-scale dataset for the language in the PDTB framework. However, the data is not openly available, is restricted to the news domain, and is by now 35 years old. In this paper, we present and evaluate a new open-access, multi-genre benchmark for PDTB-style shallow discourse parsing, based on the existing UD English GUM corpus, for which discourse relation annotations in other frameworks already exist. In a series of experiments on cross-domain relation classification, we show that while our dataset is compatible with PDTB, substantial out-of-domain degradation is observed, which can be alleviated by joint training on both datasets.

Despite recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP), hierarchical discourse parsing in the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory remains challenging, and our understanding of the reasons for this are as yet limited. In this paper, we examine and model some of the factors associated with parsing difficulties in previous work: the existence of implicit discourse relations, challenges in identifying long-distance relations, out-of-vocabulary items, and more. In order to assess the relative importance of these variables, we also release two annotated English test-sets with explicit correct and distracting discourse markers associated with gold standard RST relations. Our results show that as in shallow discourse parsing, the explicit/implicit distinction plays a role, but that long-distance dependencies are the main challenge, while lack of lexical overlap is less of a problem, at least for in-domain parsing. Our final model is able to predict where errors will occur with an accuracy of 76.3% for the bottom-up parser and 76.6% for the top-down parser.

Automatic summarization with pre-trained language models has led to impressively fluent results, but is prone to ‘hallucinations’, low performance on non-news genres, and outputs which are not exactly summaries. Targeting ACL 2023’s ‘Reality Check’ theme, we present GUMSum, a small but carefully crafted dataset of English summaries in 12 written and spoken genres for evaluation of abstractive summarization. Summaries are highly constrained, focusing on substitutive potential, factuality, and faithfulness. We present guidelines and evaluate human agreement as well as subjective judgments on recent system outputs, comparing general-domain untuned approaches, a fine-tuned one, and a prompt-based approach, to human performance. Results show that while GPT3 achieves impressive scores, it still underperforms humans, with varying quality across genres. Human judgments reveal different types of errors in supervised, prompted, and human-generated summaries, shedding light on the challenges of producing a good summary.

Recent advances in discourse parsing performance create the impression that, as in other NLP tasks, performance for high-resource languages such as English is finally becoming reliable. In this paper we demonstrate that this is not the case, and thoroughly investigate the impact of data diversity on RST parsing stability. We show that state-of-the-art architectures trained on the standard English newswire benchmark do not generalize well, even within the news domain. Using the two largest RST corpora of English with text from multiple genres, we quantify the impact of genre diversity in training data for achieving generalization to text types unseen during training. Our results show that a heterogeneous training regime is critical for stable and generalizable models, across parser architectures. We also provide error analyses of model outputs and out-of-domain performance. To our knowledge, this study is the first to fully evaluate cross-corpus RST parsing generalizability on complete trees, examine between-genre degradation within an RST corpus, and investigate the impact of genre diversity in training data composition.