Abstract
Identifying discourse relations is important for many applications, such as text/conversation understanding, single/multi-document summarization and question answering. This paper focuses on discourse relations between two successive Japanese sentences, and classified the relations into six classes in terms of their relation types. We propose an example-based method in which the system determines the discourse relation between sentences similar to two input sentences. The method utilizes phrasal pattern made from input sentences and core words in input sentences. As an evaluation result, the accuracy attains over 75% for human judgment. Moreover, it is expected for the example-based approach that the accuracy has been improved further according to the increase of the instances.
