This paper describes our submission to the DISRPT2021 Shared Task on Discourse Unit Segmentation, Connective Detection, and Relation Classification. Our system, called Dis-CoDisCo, is a Transformer-based neural classifier which enhances contextualized word embeddings (CWEs) with hand-crafted features, relying on tokenwise sequence tagging for discourse segmentation and connective detection, and a feature-rich, encoder-less sentence pair classifier for relation classification. Our results for the first two tasks outperform SOTA scores from the previous 2019 shared task, and results on relation classification suggest strong performance on the new 2021 benchmark. Ablation tests show that including features beyond CWEs are helpful for both tasks, and a partial evaluation of multiple pre-trained Transformer-based language models indicates that models pre-trained on the Next Sentence Prediction (NSP) task are optimal for relation classification.

In 2021, we organized the second iteration of a shared task dedicated to the underlying units used in discourse parsing across formalisms: the DISRPT Shared Task (Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking). Adding to the 2019 tasks on Elementary Discourse Unit Segmentation and Connective Detection, this iteration of the Shared Task included for the first time a track on discourse relation classification across three formalisms: RST, SDRT, and PDTB. In this paper we review the data included in the Shared Task, which covers nearly 3 million manually annotated tokens from 16 datasets in 11 languages, survey and compare submitted systems and report on system performance on each task for both annotated and plain-tokenized versions of the data.

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In 2023, the third iteration of the DISRPT Shared Task (Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking) was held, dedicated to the underlying units used in discourse parsing across formalisms. Following the success of the 2019 and 2021 tasks on Elementary Discourse Unit Segmentation, Connective Detection, and Relation Classification, this iteration has added 10 new corpora, including 2 new languages (Thai and Italian) and 3 discourse treebanks annotated in the discourse dependency representation in addition to the previously included frameworks: RST, SDRT, and PDTB. In this paper, we review the data included in DISRPT 2023, which covers 26 datasets across 13 languages, survey and compare submitted systems, and report on system performance on each task for both treebanked and plain-tokenized versions of the data.