Japanese Discourse Structure Analysis Based on Segmented Discourse Representation Theory Using LLMs

Satomu Tomisaki, Yosuke Mikami, Amane Watahiki, Hitomi Yanaka

Discourse parsing based on Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) is crucial for capturing the structural dynamics of dialogues. However, most prior research focuses on English, and its effectiveness for Japanese remains unclear owing to the lack of Japanese SDRT corpora. To address this issue, we construct Japanese SDRT corpora by translating existing English SDRT corpora using an LLM. Through a comparative evaluation of prompt-based and fine-tuned LLMs, we show that the models achieve comparable performance between English and Japanese, suggesting the cross-lingual applicability of SDRT-based discourse parsing. In order to investigate why the English and Japanese parsers achieve similar performance, we conduct ablation analyses on discourse markers and contextual inputs. Our results reveal that most of the Japanese discourse markers we examined have little impact, and the models' predictions depend heavily on contextual discourse relations rather than on the content of the context clauses. This structural reliance might explain the comparable performance despite the substantial typological differences between English and Japanese.