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An Empirical Study of Synthetic Data Generation for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition

Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition (IDRR), which is the task of recognizing the semantic relation between given text spans that do not contain overt clues, is a long-standing and challenging problem. In particular, the paucity of training data for some error-prone discourse relations makes the problem even more challenging. To address this issue, we propose a method of generating synthetic data for IDRR using a large language model. The proposed method is summarized as two folds: extraction of confusing discourse relation pairs based on false negative rate and synthesis of data focused on the confusion. The key points of our proposed method are utilizing a confusion matrix and adopting two-stage prompting to obtain effective synthetic data. According to the proposed method, we generated synthetic data several times larger than training examples for some error-prone discourse relations and incorporated it into training. As a result of experiments, we achieved state-of-the-art macro-F1 performance thanks to the synthetic data without sacrificing micro-F1 performance and demonstrated its positive effects especially on recognizing some infrequent discourse relations.