CoNLL 2015 Shared Task

Shallow Discourse Parsing

Shallow Discourse Parsing

A participant system is given a piece of newswire text as input and returns discourse relations in the form of a discourse connective (explicit or implicit) taking two arguments (which can be clauses, sentences, or multi-sentence segments). Specifically, the participant system needs to i) locate both explicit (e.g., "because", "however", "and".) discourse connectives in the text, ii) identify the spans of text that serve as the two arguments for each discourse connective, and iii) predict the sense of the discourse connectives (e.g., "Cause", "Condition", "Contrast"). Understanding such discourse relations is clearly an important part of natural language understanding that benefits a wide range of natural language applications. More detail and examples

Shared Task Results

The best performing system is from Jianxiang Wang and Man Lan from East China Normal University, Shanghai. The F1 scores are 29.72 and 24.00 on the WSJ test set and the blind test set respectively. Supplemental evaluation results and overview papers can be found here. The code for this system is provided for forking here.

Past Important Dates and Future Participation

The Shared Task has now concluded for this year. Please stay tuned for the next round in 2016.

  • January 26, 2015: registration begins, and release of training set and scorer
  • March 1, 2015: Registration deadline.
  • April 20, 2015: Test set available.
  • April 24, 2015 (11:59PM UTC/GMT-10) : System submission deadline
  • May 1, 2015: System results due to participants
  • May 8, 2015 (11:59PM UTC/GMT-10) : System papers due.
  • May 18, 2015: Reviews due.
  • May 21, 2015: notification of acceptance.
  • May 28, 2015: camera-ready version of system papers due.
  • July 30-31, 2015. CoNLL conference (Beijing China).

Organizing committee

  • Nianwen Xue (chair), Brandeis University
  • Hwee Tou Ng, National University of Singapore
  • Sameer Pradhan, Harvard University
  • Rashmi Prasad, University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee
  • Christopher Bryant, National University of Singapore
  • Attapol Rutherford, Brandeis University