Inferring Discourse Relations from PDTB-style Discourse Labels for Argumentative Revision Classification

AbstractPenn Discourse Treebank (PDTB)-style annotation focuses on labeling local discourse relations between text spans and typically ignores larger discourse contexts. In this paper we propose two approaches to infer discourse relations in a paragraph-level context from annotated PDTB labels. We investigate the utility of inferring such discourse information using the task of revision classification. Experimental results demonstrate that the inferred information can significantly improve classification performance compared to baselines, not only when PDTB annotation comes from humans but also from automatic parsers.