# GDTB: Genre Diverse Data for English Shallow Discourse Parsing across Modalities, Text Types, and Domains

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.00491 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00491/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Molweni: A Challenge Multiparty Dialogues-based Machine Reading Comprehension Dataset with Discourse Structure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05080/) (2020)
- [GENTLE: A Genre-Diverse Multilayer Challenge Set for English NLP and Linguistic Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01966/) (2023)
- [OntoGUM: Evaluating Contextualized SOTA Coreference Resolution on 12 More Genres](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00933/) (2021)
- [DisCoDisCo at the DISRPT2021 Shared Task: A System for Discourse Segmentation, Classification, and Connective Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09777/) (2021)
- [Why Can't Discourse Parsing Generalize? A Thorough Investigation of the Impact of Data Diversity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06488/) (2023)
- [GCDT: A Chinese RST Treebank for Multigenre and Multilingual Discourse Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10449/) (2022)
- [eRST: A Signaled Graph Theory of Discourse Relations and Organization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13560/) (2024)
- [A Cross-Genre Ensemble Approach to Robust Reddit Part of Speech Tagging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14312/) (2020)
- [AMALGUM -- A Free, Balanced, Multilayer English Web Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10677/) (2020)
- [Implicit Discourse Relation Identification for Open-domain Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.03975/) (2019)
- [Implicit Discourse Relation Classification For Nigerian Pidgin](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18776/) (2024)
- [Fortunately, Discourse Markers Can Enhance Language Models for Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02026/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [ParsTranslit: Truly Versatile Tajik-Farsi Transliteration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07520/) (2025)
- [Discursive Circuits: How Do Language Models Understand Discourse Relations?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11210/) (2025)
- [DeDisCo at the DISRPT 2025 Shared Task: A System for Discourse Relation Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11498/) (2025)
- [Expect the Unexpected? Testing the Surprisal of Salient Entities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10724/) (2026)
- [DiscoExplorer: An Open Interface for the Study of Multilingual Discourse Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15304/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Work on shallow discourse parsing in English has focused on the Wall Street Journal corpus, the only large-scale dataset for the language in the PDTB framework. However, the data is not openly available, is restricted to the news domain, and is by now 35 years old. In this paper, we present and evaluate a new open-access, multi-genre benchmark for PDTB-style shallow discourse parsing, based on the existing UD English GUM corpus, for which discourse relation annotations in other frameworks already exist. In a series of experiments on cross-domain relation classification, we show that while our dataset is compatible with PDTB, substantial out-of-domain degradation is observed, which can be alleviated by joint training on both datasets.