A deep-learning approach to mining conditions

A condition is a constraint that determines when a consequent holds. Mining them in text is paramount to understand many sentences properly. In the literature, there are a few pattern-based proposals that fall short regarding recall because it is not easy to characterise unusual ways to express conditions with hand-crafted patterns; there is one machine-learning proposal that is bound to the Japanese language, requires specific-purpose dictionaries, taxonomies, and heuristics, works on opinion sentences only, and was evaluated very shallowly. In this article, we present a deep-learning proposal to mine conditions that does not have any of the previous drawbacks; furthermore, we have performed a comprehensive experimental study on a large multi-lingual dataset on many common topics; our conclusion is that our proposals are similar to the state of the art in terms of precision, but improve recall enough to beat them in terms of F1 score.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2013-40848-RMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2016-75394-