Rhetorical Structure Theory: Looking Back and Moving Ahead

Rhetorical Structure Theory has enjoyed continuous attention since its origins in the 1980s. It has been applied, compared to other approaches, and also criticized in a number of areas in discourse analysis, theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics. In this paper, we review some of the discussions about the theory itself, especially addressing issues of the reliability of analyses and psychological validity, together with a discussion of the nature of text relations. We also propose areas for further research. A follow-up paper (Taboada and Mann, to appear) will discuss applications of the theory in various fields. 1 Reviewing Rhetorical Structure Theory Rhetorical Structure Theory is a theory of text organization created in the 1980s as a result of exhaustive analyses of texts, described in Mann and Thompson (1988). Since then, the theory has enjoyed a large following, especially in computational linguistics, where it is often used to plan coherent text and to parse the structure of texts. RST was popular since its very beginning. Citations of the 1988 article in journals begin in 1989 (Cornish, 1989). Other technical reports (Mann and Thompson, 1983) are cited even earlier (e.g., Grosz and Sidner, 1986; Hirschberg and Litman, 1987). Web of Science shows 137 citations of the 1988 paper, and Google Scholar displays 525. CiteSeer contains 167 citations to the 1988 paper, and 172 citations of a paper dated 19872. The latter was a technical report (Mann and Thompson, 1987), which was to ∗ This paper has been accepted for publication in Discourse Studies and the final (edited, revised and typeset) version of this paper will be published in Discourse Studies 8 (3), 2006 by Sage Publications Ltd, All rights reserved. © Sage Publications Ltd, 2006. 1 Bill Mann passed away on August 13, 2004, as this paper was close to a final draft. He had been the driving force behind it, and we had worked together on earlier drafts, but I must now assume all responsibility for omissions and inaccuracies in this version. I only hope that the paper will serve to highlight the enduring contribution of Bill’s research. For a description of Bill’s research, and a tribute to his life, see the piece written by Christian Matthiessen for Computational Linguistics (Matthiessen, 2005) . [MT] 2 The Web of Science (available through some university libraries), the Google Scholar (scholar.google.com) and the CiteSeer (citeseer.ist.psu.edu) figures are as of July 5, 2005.