Proceedings of the 55Th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Pages 112–122 Vancouver, Canada, July 30 - August 4, 2017
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Discourse Mode Identification in Essays Wei Song†, Dong Wang‡, Ruiji Fu‡, Lizhen Liu†, Ting Liu§, Guoping Hu‡ †Information Engineering, Capital Normal University, Beijing, China ‡iFLYTEK Research, Beijing, China §Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China wsong, lzliu @cnu.edu.cn, dongwang4,rjfu, gphu @iflytek.com, [email protected] { } { } Abstract tences which form a unified whole and make up the discourse (Clark et al., 2013). Recognizing the Discourse modes play an important role in structure of text organization is a key part for dis- writing composition and evaluation. This course analysis. Meurer (2002) points that dis- paper presents a study on the manual and course modes stand for unity as they constitute automatic identification of narration, ex- general patterns of language organization strate- position, description, argument and emo- gically used by the writer. Smith (2003) also pro- tion expressing sentences in narrative es- poses to study discourse passages from a linguistic says. We annotate a corpus to study the view of point through discourse modes. The orga- characteristics of discourse modes and de- nization of a text can be realized by segmenting scribe a neural sequence labeling model text into passages according to the set of discourse for identification. Evaluation results show modes that are used to indicate the functional re- that discourse modes can be identified au- lationship between the several parts of the text. tomatically with an average F1-score of For example, the writer can present major events 0.7. We further demonstrate that discourse through narration, provide details with description modes can be used as features that im- and establish ideas with argument. The combi- prove automatic essay scoring (AES). The nation and interaction of various discourse modes impacts of discourse modes for AES are make an organized unified text. also discussed. Second, discourse modes have rhetorical significance. Discourse modes are closely related 1 Introduction to rhetoric (Connors, 1981; Brooks and Warren, Discourse modes, also known as rhetorical 1958), which offers a principle for learning how to modes, describe the purpose and conventions express material in the best way. Discourse modes of the main kinds of language based communi- have different preferences on expressive styles. cation.Most common discourse modes include Narration mainly controls story progression by narration, description, exposition and argument. introducing and connecting events; exposition is A typical text would make use of all the modes, to instruct or explain so that the language should although in a given one there will often be a be precise and informative; argument is used to main mode. Despite their importance in writing convince or persuade through logical and inspiring composition and assessment (Braddock et al., statements; description attempts to bring detailed 1963), there is relatively little work on analyzing observations of people and scenery, which is discourse modes based on computational models. related to the writing of figurative language; the We aim to contribute for automatic discourse way to express emotions may relate to the use of mode identification and its application on writing rhetorical devices and poetic language. Discourse assessment. modes reflect the variety of expressive styles. The The use of discourse modes is important in writ- flexible use of various discourse modes should be ing composition, because they relate to several as- important evidence of language proficiency. pects that would influence the quality of a text. According to the above thought, we propose the First, discourse modes reflect the organization discourse mode identification task. In particular, of a text. Natural language texts consist of sen- we make the following contributions: 112 Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 112–122 Vancouver, Canada, July 30 - August 4, 2017. c 2017 Association for Computational Linguistics https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/P17-1011 We build a corpus of narrative essays written since Chinese doesn’t have grammatical tense • by Chinese students in native language. (Xue and Zhang, 2014) and sentence components Sentence level discourse modes are annotated are often omitted. This increases the difficulties with acceptable inter-annotator agreement. for situation entity type based discourse mode Corpus analysis reveals the characteristics of identification. In this paper, we investigate an discourse modes in several aspects, including end-to-end approach to directly model discourse discourse mode distribution, co-occurrence modes without the necessity of identifying and transition patterns. situation entity types first. We describe a multi-label neural sequence la- 2.2 Automatic Writing Assessment • beling approach for discourse mode identi- Automatic writing assessment is an important ap- fication so that the co-occurrence and tran- plication of natural language processing. The task sition preferences can be captured. Experi- aims to let computers have the ability to appreciate mental results show that discourse modes can and criticize writing. It would be hugely benefi- be identified with an average F1-score of 0.7, cial for applications like automatic essay scoring indicating that automatic discourse mode i- (AES) and content recommendation. dentification is feasible. AES is the task of building a computer-aided We demonstrate the effectiveness of taking scoring system, in order to reduce the involvement • discourse modes into account for automatic of human raters. Traditional approaches are essay scoring. A higher ratio of description based on supervised learning with designed and emotion expressing can indicate essay feature templates (Larkey, 1998; Burstein, 2003; quality to a certain extent. Discourse modes Attali and Burstein, 2006; Chen and He, 2013; can be potentially used as features for other Phandi et al., 2015; Cummins et al., 2016). NLP applications. Recently, automatic feature learning based on neural networks starts to draw attentions 2 Related Work (Alikaniotis et al., 2016; Dong and Zhang, 2016; Taghipour and Ng, 2016). 2.1 Discourse Analysis Writing assessment involves highly technical Discourse analysis is an important subfield of aspects of language and discourse. In addition natural language processing (Webber et al., 2011). to give a score, it would be better to provide Discourse is expected to be both cohesive and explainable feedbacks to learners at the same time. coherent. Many principles are proposed for Some work has studied several aspects such as discourse analysis, such as coherence relations spelling errors (Brill and Moore, 2000), grammar (Hobbs, 1979; Mann and Thompson, 1988), the errors (Rozovskaya and Roth, 2010), coherence centering theory for local coherence (Grosz et al., (Barzilay and Lapata, 2008), organization of 1995) and topic-based text segmentation (Hearst, argumentative essays (Persing et al., 2010) and the 1997). In some domains, discourse can be use of figurative language (Louis and Nenkova, segmented according to specific discourse ele- 2013). This paper extends this line of work by ments (Hutchins, 1977; Teufel and Moens, 2002; taking discourse modes into account. Burstein et al., 2003; Clerehan and Buchbinder, 2006; Song et al., 2015). 2.3 Neural Sequence Modeling This paper focuses on discourse modes A main challenge of discourse analysis is hard influenced by Smith (2003). From the linguistic to collect large scale data due to its complexity, view of point, discourse modes are supposed to which may lead to data sparseness problem. have different distributions of situation entity Recently, neural networks become popular for types such as event, state and generic (Smith, natural language processing (Bengio et al., 2003; 2003; Mavridou et al., 2015). Therefore, there Collobert et al., 2011). One of the advantages is is work on automatically labeling clause level the ability of automatic representation learning. situation entity types (Palmer et al., 2007; Representing words or relations with continuous Friedrich et al., 2016). Actually, situation entity vectors (Mikolov et al., 2013; Ji and Eisenstein, type identification is also a challenging problem. 2014) embeds semantics in the same space, which It is even harder for processing Chinese language, benefits alleviating the data sparseness problem 113 and enables end-to-end and multi-task learning. is added on the basis of four recognized discourse Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) (Graves, 2012) modes and Smith’s report mode is viewed as a sub- and the variants like Long Short-Term Memory type of description mode: dialogue description. (LSTM) (Hochreiter and Schmidhuber, 1997) and In summary, we study the following discourse Gated Recurrent (GRU) (Cho et al., 2014) neural modes: networks show good performance for capturing long distance dependencies on tasks like Named Narration introduces an event or series of • Entity Recognition (NER) (Chiu and Nichols, events into the universe of discourse. The 2016; Ma and Hovy, 2016), dependency parsing events are temporally related according to (Dyer et al., 2015) and semantic composition narrative time. of documents (Tang et al., 2015). This work E.g., Last year, we drove to San Francisco describes a hierarchical neural architecture with along the State Route 1 (SR 1). multiple label outputs for modeling the discourse mode sequence of sentences. Exposition has a function to explain or in- • struct. It provides background