Title: Joint Syntacto-Discourse Parsing and the Syntacto-Discourse Treebank,
Abstract: Discourse parsing has long been treated as a stand-alone problem independent
from constituency or dependency parsing. Most attempts at this problem are
pipelined rather than end-to-end, sophisticated, and not self-contained: they
assume gold-standard text segmentations (Elementary Discourse Units), and use
external parsers for syntactic features. In this paper we propose the first
end-to-end discourse parser that jointly parses in both syntax and discourse
levels, as well as the first syntacto-discourse treebank by integrating the
Penn Treebank with the RST Treebank. Built upon our recent span-based
constituency parser, this joint syntacto-discourse parser requires no
preprocessing whatsoever (such as segmentation or feature extraction), achieves
the state-of-the-art end-to-end discourse parsing accuracy.