Attelo is a discourse parsing library. The parsers predict a a discourse graph out of a set of elementary discourse units. These predictions are informed by models that allow the parser to assign probabilities to the links.
As a minimum, you will need a way to extract features from your discourse corpus, and from any new inputs outside of your corpus. The educe library provides this functionality for a handful of pre-existing corpora, and can also be used to build feature extractors for your own corpora.
It would probably be a good idea to build some sort of test harness for your discourse experiments (have a look at the quickstart). For more detailed experiments, you might use the irit-rst-dt experiment as a starting point, or alternatively, build something off the Shake build system.
NB: The attelo evaluate command can be seen as a harness of
sorts but is bit limited at the moment. Our project harnessses use it
as one of its component, but throw in things like feature extraction,
and some basic looping around decoder/learner types. That said, it is
possible that attelo evaluate will grow some features of its own
and reduce the amount of infrastructure you need to build.
Discourse parsing (rough sketch, see the --help):
- extract features (DIY)
- use attelo to enfold, learn, decode, and score (see quickstart)
There is work in progress to break attelo evaluate up to avoid
repeated work. The idea would be to save intermediary models for
each fold and to re-use these models to test various decoders. The
new experiments would look a bit more like this:
- extract features (DIY)
- attelo enfold
- for each fold: attelo learn --fold, attelo decode --fold
- attelo report
See the requirements above. We recommend building an experimental harness around attelo instead of trying to use it by hand. Even a couple of shell scripts would be better than nothing.
Attelo is developed within the IRIT Melodi team, based on work originally by Stergos Afantenos, Pascal Denis, and Philippe Muller. At the time of this writing (2015-02) it is maintained by Eric Kow.
Attelo is released under a liberal BSD3-like CeCILL-B license. Aside from conformance with French law, the difference between the CeCILL-B and other similarly liberal licenses is the strong citation requirement mentioned in article 5.3.4 quoted below:
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