# Cross-lingual RST Discourse Parsing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.02946 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.02946/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 11 Jan 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [DMRST: A Joint Framework for Document-Level Multilingual RST Discourse Segmentation and Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04518/) (2021)
- [Surprise! Uniform Information Density Isn't the Whole Story: Predicting Surprisal Contours in Long-form Discourse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16062/) (2024)
- [DisCoDisCo at the DISRPT2021 Shared Task: A System for Discourse Segmentation, Classification, and Connective Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09777/) (2021)
- [RST Parsing from Scratch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10861/) (2021)
- [GCDT: A Chinese RST Treebank for Multigenre and Multilingual Discourse Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10449/) (2022)
- [Enhanced Speaker-aware Multi-party Multi-turn Dialogue Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04066/) (2021)
- [PAC-Bayesian Domain Adaptation Bounds for Multiclass Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05685/) (2022)
- [Probing Multilingual Language Models for Discourse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04832/) (2021)
- [The Change that Matters in Discourse Parsing: Estimating the Impact of Domain Shift on Parser Error](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11317/) (2022)
- [Top-down Discourse Parsing via Sequence Labelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02080/) (2021)
- [Deep Discourse Analysis for Generating Personalized Feedback in Intelligent Tutor Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07785/) (2021)
- [Multi-tasking Dialogue Comprehension with Discourse Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03269/) (2021)
- [Bilingual Rhetorical Structure Parsing with Large Parallel Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14969/) (2024)
- [Structured Dialogue Discourse Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15103/) (2023)
- [Probing LLMs for Multilingual Discourse Generalization Through a Unified Label Set](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10515/) (2025)
- [Bridging Discourse Treebanks with a Unified Rhetorical Structure Parser](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06427/) (2025)
- [Less is More: A Lightweight and Robust Neural Architecture for Discourse Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09537/) (2022)
- [RST-style Discourse Parsing Guided by Document-level Content Structures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04141/) (2023)
- [Improving Cross-Lingual Transfer for Sequential Sentence Classification in Research Papers via Structural Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.19650/) (2026)
- [Worth Their Weights? Evaluating Generative Models for Discourse Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.17658/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Discourse parsing is an integral part of understanding information flow and argumentative structure in documents. Most previous research has focused on inducing and evaluating models from the English RST Discourse Treebank. However, discourse treebanks for other languages exist, including Spanish, German, Basque, Dutch and Brazilian Portuguese. The treebanks share the same underlying linguistic theory, but differ slightly in the way documents are annotated. In this paper, we present (a) a new discourse parser which is simpler, yet competitive (significantly better on 2/3 metrics) to state of the art for English, (b) a harmonization of discourse treebanks across languages, enabling us to present (c) what to the best of our knowledge are the first experiments on cross-lingual discourse parsing.