Adaptive Prompt Learning with Distilled Connective Knowledge for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition

TL;DR

This paper introduces AdaptPrompt, a continuous prompt learning method with connective knowledge distillation for implicit discourse relation recognition, reducing manual effort and improving performance over existing approaches.

Contribution

It proposes a novel continuous prompt learning framework with automatic template selection and knowledge transfer, enhancing IDRR accuracy and practicality.

Findings

Achieved superior relation recognition performance on PDTB Corpus V3.0

Reduced manual template design through continuous prompting

Validated effectiveness of knowledge distillation in IDRR

Abstract

Implicit discourse relation recognition (IDRR) aims at recognizing the discourse relation between two text segments without an explicit connective. Recently, the prompt learning has just been applied to the IDRR task with great performance improvements over various neural network-based approaches. However, the discrete nature of the state-art-of-art prompting approach requires manual design of templates and answers, a big hurdle for its practical applications. In this paper, we propose a continuous version of prompt learning together with connective knowledge distillation, called AdaptPrompt, to reduce manual design efforts via continuous prompting while further improving performance via knowledge transfer. In particular, we design and train a few virtual tokens to form continuous templates and automatically select the most suitable one by gradient search in the embedding space. We also design an answer-relation mapping rule to generate a few virtual answers as the answer space. Furthermore, we notice the importance of annotated connectives in the training dataset and design a teacher-student architecture for knowledge transfer. Experiments on the up-to-date PDTB Corpus V3.0 validate our design objectives in terms of the better relation recognition performance over the state-of-the-art competitors.