Automatic detection of discourse relations in natural language text is important for numerous tasks in NLP, such as sentiment analysis (Somasundaran et al., 2009), text summarization (Marcu, 2000) and dialogue generation (Piwek et al., 2007).
most of the recent work employing discourse relation classifiers are based on fully-supervised machine learning approaches (duVerle and Prendinger, 2009;Pitler et al., 2009;Lin et al., 2009).