  Implicit discourse relation classification is of great challenge due to the
lack of connectives as strong linguistic cues, which motivates the use of
annotated implicit connectives to improve the recognition. We propose a feature
imitation framework in which an implicit relation network is driven to learn
from another neural network with access to connectives, and thus encouraged to
extract similarly salient features for accurate classification. We develop an
adversarial model to enable an adaptive imitation scheme through competition
between the implicit network and a rival feature discriminator. Our method
effectively transfers discriminability of connectives to the implicit features,
and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the PDTB benchmark.
