The discourse structure is represented as the clause relevance structure, which can effectively describe the direct semantic association between discontinuous and cross-level clauses in a text, compared with the hierarchical discourse structure pattern such as rhetorical structure theory. Firstly, the scheme of clause relevance structure, its judgment criteria and formal constraints. The manual annotation experiments are conducted. Then, the automatic recognition of Chinese clause relevance structure is studied. On the corpus of Chinese discourse clause relevance structure we built, the best recognition accuracy is 92.70% based on the classification model, with the connectives, vocabulary and other classification features. The experimental results show that the ring-removing effect obtained by the overall sampling of corpus is better than that of independent sampling, and the features of vocabulary, clause distance and clause domain contribute greatly to the recognition. Long distance and cross sentences of clause pair are the difficulties of clause relevance recognition, but adjacent clauses and clauses in the same sentence are especially difficult to recognize as uncorrelated clauses.