Combining hierarchical clustering and machine learning to predict high-level discourse structure

  • Authors:
  • Caroline Sporleder;Alex Lascarides

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh;University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh

  • Venue:
  • COLING '04 Proceedings of the 20th international conference on Computational Linguistics
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

We propose a novel method to predict the interparagraph discourse structure of text, i.e. to infer which paragraphs are related to each other and form larger segments on a higher level. Our method combines a clustering algorithm with a model of segment "relatedness" acquired in a machine learning step. The model integrates information from a variety of sources, such as word co-occurrence, lexical chains, cue phrases, punctuation, and tense. Our method outperforms an approach that relies on word co-occurrence alone.