# DiscoExplorer: An Open Interface for the Study of Multilingual Discourse Relations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15304 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15304/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [SciDTB: Discourse Dependency TreeBank for Scientific Abstracts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03653/) (2018)
- [GENTLE: A Genre-Diverse Multilayer Challenge Set for English NLP and Linguistic Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01966/) (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)
- [Unifying Discourse Resources with Dependency Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00167/) (2021)
- [Persian Rhetorical Structure Theory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13833/) (2021)
- [GDTB: Genre Diverse Data for English Shallow Discourse Parsing across Modalities, Text Types, and Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00491/) (2024)
- [Semgrex and Ssurgeon, Searching and Manipulating Dependency Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16250/) (2024)
- [DeDisCo at the DISRPT 2025 Shared Task: A System for Discourse Relation Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11498/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The relations connecting propositions in discourse such as cause (A because B) or concession (A although B) are a subject of intense interest in Computational Linguistics and Pragmatics, but challenging to study and compare across languages. Recent progress in standardizing discourse relation inventories across datasets offers the potential to facilitate such studies, but is hindered by the complexity of relevant data and the lack of easily accessible interfaces to analyze it. In this paper we present DiscoExplorer, a new open source web interface, capable of running on local computers, which we use to make datasets from the DISRPT Shared Task on discourse relation classification publicly available, covering 16 different languages. We present the query language, search and visualization facilities for relations and signaling devices such as connectives, as well as some example studies.