Textual Relations as Part of Multiple

Many text planning systems are based on a theoretical linguistic approach which assumes the existence of relations between units of text. The relational approach most extensively used in text generation is the Rhetorical Structure Theory (rst, Mann and Thompson 1987). The phenomenon of multiple relations , i.e. the fact that in natural language texts we often nd more than one relation holding between two text units, has not been treated by rst. In this paper we show how the taxonomy of discourse structure relations as proposed in Maier and Hovy (1991) can be exploited to account for a subtype of multiple relations. We also give an outline of a computational model to generate texts including multiple relations.