DISRetrieval: Harnessing Discourse Structure for Long Document Retrieval

Abstract: Long document understanding has become increasingly crucial in natural language processing, with retrieval-based methods emerging as a promising solution to address the context length limitations of LLMs. However, existing approaches either treat documents as flat sequences or employ arbitrary chunking strategies, failing to capture the inherent discourse structure that guides human comprehension. We present DISRetrieval, a novel hierarchical retrieval framework that leverages linguistic discourse structure to enhance long document understanding. Our approach introduces three key innovations: (1) a discourse-aware document organization framework that utilizes rhetorical structure theory (RST) to create sentence-level hierarchical representations, preserving both semantic relationships and natural document flow; (2) an LLM-enhanced node representation technique that combines discourse structure with adaptive summarization to enrich tree nodes with contextual information; and (3) a hierarchical evidence retrieval mechanism that effectively selects relevant content while maintaining discourse coherence. Through comprehensive experiments on QASPER and QuALITY datasets, DISRetrieval demonstrates substantial improvements over existing methods in both token-level retrieval metrics and downstream question answering tasks. Our ablation studies confirm that incorporating discourse structure significantly enhances retrieval effectiveness across different document lengths and query types, validating the importance of linguistically-informed document representation in long-text understanding. Our code and datasets are publicly available at github/DreamH1gh/DISRetrieval to facilitate future research.