An Analysis of Sentential Neighbors in Implicit Discourse Relation Prediction

Discourse relation classification is an especially difficult task without explicit context markers {Prasad2008ThePD}. Current approaches to implicit relation prediction solely rely on two neighboring sentences being targeted, ignoring the broader context of their surrounding environments {Atwell2021WhereAW}. In this research, we propose three new methods in which to incorporate context in the task of sentence relation prediction: (1) Direct Neighbors (DNs), (2) Expanded Window Neighbors (EWNs), and (3) Part-Smart Random Neighbors (PSRNs). Our findings indicate that the inclusion of context beyond one discourse unit is harmful in the task of discourse relation classification.