Coupling Local Context and Global Semantic Prototypes via a Hierarchical Architecture for Rhetorical Roles Labeling

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03856v1
• Date: Wed, 04 Mar 2026 09:05:24 GMT
• Title: Coupling Local Context and Global Semantic Prototypes via a Hierarchical Architecture for Rhetorical Roles Labeling
• Authors: Anas Belfathi, Nicolas Hernandez, Laura Monceaux, Warren Bonnard, Mary Catherine Lavissiere, Christine Jacquin, Richard Dufour,
• Abstract summary: Rhetorical Role Labeling (RRL) identifies the functional role of each sentence in a document.<n>We propose two prototype-based methods that integrate local context with global representations.<n>Experiments on legal, medical, and scientific benchmarks show consistent improvements over strong baselines.
• Score: 5.444158140267451
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: Rhetorical Role Labeling (RRL) identifies the functional role of each sentence in a document, a key task for discourse understanding in domains such as law and medicine. While hierarchical models capture local dependencies effectively, they are limited in modeling global, corpus-level features. To address this limitation, we propose two prototype-based methods that integrate local context with global representations. Prototype-Based Regularization (PBR) learns soft prototypes through a distance-based auxiliary loss to structure the latent space, while Prototype-Conditioned Modulation (PCM) constructs corpus-level prototypes and injects them during training and inference. Given the scarcity of RRL resources, we introduce SCOTUS-Law, the first dataset of U.S. Supreme Court opinions annotated with rhetorical roles at three levels of granularity: category, rhetorical function, and step. Experiments on legal, medical, and scientific benchmarks show consistent improvements over strong baselines, with 4 Macro-F1 gains on low-frequency roles. We further analyze the implications in the era of Large Language Models and complement our findings with expert evaluation.

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