Understanding discourse structures of news articles is vital to effectively contextualize the occurrence of a news event. To enable computational modeling of news structures, we apply an existing theory of functional discourse structure for news articles that revolves around the main event and create a human-annotated corpus of 802 documents spanning over four domains and three media sources. Next, we propose several document-level neural-network models to automatically construct news content structures. Finally, we demonstrate that incorporating system predicted news structures yields new state-of-the-art performance for event coreference resolution. The news documents we annotated are openly available and the annotations are publicly released for future research.

Most supervised word sense disambiguation (WSD) systems build word-specific classifiers by leveraging labeled data. However, when using word-specific classifiers, the sparseness of annotations leads to inferior sense disambiguation performance on less frequently seen words. To combat data sparsity, we propose to learn a single model that derives sense representations and meanwhile enforces congruence between a word instance and its right sense by using both sense-annotated data and lexical resources. The model is shared across words that allows utilizing sense correlations across words, and therefore helps to transfer common disambiguation rules from annotation-rich words to annotation-lean words. Empirical evaluation on benchmark datasets shows that the proposed shared model outperforms the equivalent classifier-based models by 1.7%, 2.5% and 3.8% in F1-score when using GloVe, ELMo and BERT word embeddings respectively.