DisSent: Sentence Representation Learning from Explicit Discourse Relations

Understand

Learning effective representations of sentences is one of the core missions of natural language understanding.

• Existing models either train on a vast amount of text, or require costly, manually curated sentence relation datasets.
• We show that with dependency parsing and rule-based rubrics, we can curate a high quality sentence relation task by leveraging explicit discourse relations.
• We show that our curated dataset provides an excellent signal for learning vector representations of sentence meaning, representing relations that can only be determined when the meanings of two sentences are combined.