Towards an Implementation of Rhetorical Structure Theory in Discourse Coherence Modelling

Abstract

In this paper, we combine the discourse coherence principles of Elementary Discourse Unit segmentation and Rhetorical Structure Theory parsing to construct meaningful graph-based text representations. We then evaluate a Graph Convolutional Network and a Graph Attention Network on these representations. Our results establish a new benchmark in F1-score assessment for discourse coherence modelling while also showing that Graph Convolutional Network models are generally more computationally efficient and provide superior accuracy.