First, we differentiate between intra-and multi-sentential discourse relations, which is motivated by a finding in the field of RST-style discourse parsing -distributions of various discourse relation types are quite distinct between intra-sentential and multi-sentential instances (Feng and Hirst, 2012b; Joty et al., 2012) -and we assume that a similar phenomenon exists for PDTB-style discourse relations.
we assign two sets of discourse roles to each entity: intra-sentential and multi-sentential roles, which are the roles that the entity plays in the corresponding intra-and multi-sentential relations.