Transformer-based document-level discourse processing: Exploiting prior language knowledge and hierarchical parsing

Document-level discourse parsing, in accordance with the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), remains notoriously challenging. Challenges include the deep structure of document-level discourse trees, the requirement of subtle semantic judgments, and the lack of large-scale training corpora. To address such challenges, we propose to exploit robust representations derived from multiple levels of granularity across syntax and semantics, and in turn incorporate such representations in an end-to-end encoder–decoder neural architecture for more resourceful discourse processing. In particular, we first use a pre-trained contextual language model that embodies high-order and long-range correlation to enable finer-grain semantic, syntactic, and organizational representations. We further encode such representations with boundary and hierarchical information to obtain more refined modeling for document-level discourse processing. Experimental results show that our parser achieves the state-of-the-art performance, approaching human-level performance on the benchmarked English RST dataset. We also demonstrate how the proposed framework can be extended effectively to multilingual RST discourse parsing and abstractive document summarization tasks.