Implicit discourse relation recognition is a crucial component for automatic discourselevel analysis and nature language understanding. Previous studies exploit discriminative models that are built on either powerful manual features or deep discourse representations. In this paper, instead, we explore generative models and propose a variational neural discourse relation recognizer. We refer to this model as VarNDRR. VarNDRR establishes a directed probabilistic model with a latent continuous variable that generates both a discourse and the relation between the two arguments of the discourse. In order to perform efficient inference and learning, we introduce neural discourse relation models to approximate the prior and posterior distributions of the latent variable, and employ these approximated distributions to optimize a reparameterized variational lower bound. This allows VarNDRR to be trained with standard stochastic gradient methods. Experiments on the benchmark data set show that VarNDRR can achieve comparable results against stateof- the-art baselines without using any manual features.
@cite_0: Sentences form coherent relations in a discourse without discourse connectives more frequently than with connectives. Senses of these implicit discourse relations that hold between a sentence pair, however, are challenging to infer. Here, we employ Brown cluster pairs to represent discourse relation and incorporate coreference patterns to identify senses of implicit discourse relations in naturally occurring text. Our system improves the baseline performance by as much as 25 . Feature analyses suggest that Brown cluster pairs and coreference patterns can reveal many key linguistic characteristics of each type of discourse relation.
@cite_18: 
@cite_1: We report results on predicting the sense of implicit discourse relations between adjacent sentences in text. Our investigation concentrates on the association between discourse relations and properties of the referring expressions that appear in the related sentences. The properties of interest include coreference information, grammatical role, information status and syntactic form of referring expressions. Predicting the sense of implicit discourse relations based on these features is considerably better than a random baseline and several of the most discriminative features conform with linguistic intuitions. However, these features do not perform as well as lexical features traditionally used for sense prediction.
@cite_8: We present the second version of the Penn Discourse Treebank, PDTB-2.0, describing its lexically-grounded annotations of discourse relations and their two abstract object arguments over the 1 million word Wall Street Journal corpus. We describe all aspects of the annotation, including (a) the argument structure of discourse relations, (b) the sense annotation of the relations, and (c) the attribution of discourse relations and each of their arguments. We list the differences between PDTB-1.0 and PDTB-2.0. We present representative statistics for several aspects of the annotation in the corpus.
Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition Due to the release of Penn Discourse Treebank @cite_8 corpus, constantly increasing efforts are made for implicit DRR. Upon this corpus, exploit several linguistically informed features, such as polarity tags, modality and lexical features. further incorporate context words, word pairs as well as discourse parse information into their classifier. Following this direction, several more powerful features have been exploited: entities @cite_1 , word embeddings @cite_18 , Brown cluster pairs and co-reference patterns @cite_0 . With these features, Park and Cardie perform feature set optimization for better feature combination.