---
title: "Spectral Semi-Supervised Discourse Relation — Fisher 2015"
description: "Implicit discourse relations, where no connective word signals the link between two text spans, are among the hardest parts of discourse parsing."
authors: ["Robert Fisher", "Reid Simmons"]
year: 2015
venue: "Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/P15-2015/"
doi: "10.3115/v1/p15-2015"
licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/fisher-2015-spectral-semi-supervised-discourse-relation/"
---
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# Spectral Semi-Supervised Discourse Relation Classification

**Authors:** Robert Fisher, Reid Simmons · **Year:** 2015 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/P15-2015/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/P15-2015.pdf) · [DOI 10.3115/v1/p15-2015](https://doi.org/10.3115/v1/p15-2015) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2251565114)

**Citations:** 11 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [6](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
Implicit discourse relations, where no connective word signals the link between two text spans, are among the hardest parts of discourse parsing. Most systems depend only on costly human annotation. Fisher and Simmons propose a semi-supervised approach that combines the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) with a large pool of unlabeled news text from the New York Times Annotated Corpus. Relations between adjacent EDUs are treated as a sequence and modeled with an HMM-style latent variable model, learned with spectral methods following Hsu et al. (2012). This makes training fast, statistically consistent and free of local optima.

Unlabeled data enters through bootstrapping. After each round, automatically labeled sequences that the model is confident about and that resemble the labeled corpus are added to the training set. On the PDTB implicit relations task, the method reaches an F1 of 0.485, about 7–9 points above purely supervised systems. It also matches supervised accuracy using roughly half the labeled data. This suggests discourse parsers could be moved to new domains with less annotation effort.

## Key points
- **Data:** PDTB (Wall Street Journal) supplies the labeled data. The paper reports about 16K implicit relations (16,224 in one place, 16,053 in another), restricted to 11 level-2 relation classes. The unlabeled data comes from the New York Times Annotated Corpus, with about 1.8M articles from 1987–2007. PDTB sections 2–22 were used for training and section 23 for testing.
- **Model:** A spectral HMM with one latent state per relation is learned in an SVD-derived subspace. Features come from Feng and Hirst (2014) and are augmented with 200 LDA concepts computed over Wikipedia.
- **Semi-supervised selection:** Unlabeled sequences are labeled with Viterbi and ranked by density-weighted certainty sampling (DCS). DCS combines prediction entropy with a KDE-based density computed over 100-dimensional LDA vectors. Training ran for 7 bootstrapping rounds.
- **Results:** Trained on labeled data only, the model scores F1 41.1%, comparable to Lin et al. (2014). With unlabeled data it reaches F1 0.485, a gain of 7–9 points, and it matches the supervised score using about 50% of the labeled data.
- **Efficiency:** Spectral optimization keeps training tractable even with more than one million unlabeled documents.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/linguistics/)

Topics: [Discourse analysis](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/discourse-analysis/) · [Treebanks](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/treebanks/)

## Cited by

Cited by

6 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 4 of them have a page here, 2 not yet.

- [Multi-task Attention-based Neural Networks for Implicit Discourse Relationship Representation and Identification](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/lan-2017-multi-task-attention-based-neural/)
- [Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition with Context-aware Character-enhanced Embeddings](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/qin-2016-implicit-discourse-relation-recognition-context/)
- [Two End-to-end Shallow Discourse Parsers for English and Chinese in CoNLL-2016 Shared Task](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/wang-2016-two-end-end-shallow-discourse/)
- [Variational Neural Discourse Relation Recognizer](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/zhang-2016-variational-neural-discourse-relation-recognizer/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{fisher2015spectral,
  title = {{Spectral Semi-Supervised Discourse Relation Classification}},
  author = {Fisher, Robert and Simmons, Reid},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)},
  year = {2015},
  doi = {10.3115/v1/p15-2015},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/v1/p15-2015}
}
```

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