The IMAGENE project has studied the expression of actions in the context of instructional text generation. The approach employs a rather traditional interpretation of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) (Mann and Thompson, 1989), using it both as a descriptive tool and as a constructive tool (Mann and Thompson, 1987). No explicit representation of and reasoning about intentions was employed. In t...

Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) [2, 7] provides a dynamic semantics for discourse that exploits a rich notion of discourse structure. According to SDRT, a text is segmented into constituents related to each other by means of rhetorical relations; the resulting structure, known as a segmented discourse representation structure or SDRS has various semantic effects. This theory ha...

Empirical studies of text coherence often use tree-like structures in the spirit of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) as representational device. This paper identifies several sources of ambiguity in RST-inspired trees and argues that such structures are therefore not as explanatory as a text representation should be. As an alternative, an approach toward multi-level annotation (MLA) of texts i...

This article offers a rhetorical design perspective on persuasive technology design, introducing Bitzer’s method of the rhetorical situation. As a case study, knowledge workers in an industrial engineering corporation are examined using Bitzer’s method. Introducing a new system, knowledge workers are to be given the task of innovating and maintaining business processes, thus contributing with c...

This thesis is an inquiry into the nature of the high-level, rhetorical structure of unrestricted natural language texts, computational means to enable its derivation, and two applications (in automatic summarization and natural language generation) that follow from the ability to build such structures automatically. The thesis proposes a rst-order formalization of the high-level, rhetorical st...

In the project SemDok (Generic document structures in linearly organised texts) funded by the German Research Foundation DFG, a discourse parser for a complex type (scientific articles by example), is being developed. Discourse parsing (henceforth DP) according to the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) (Mann and Taboada, 2005; Marcu, 2000) deals with automatically assigning a text a tree structu...

It is generally agreed that text has structure (at least, coherent text does). Therefore, an understanding and appreciation of text structure must play some role in building computational systems that are capable of using text as people do. What is less clear is what are necessary and sufficient sources of structure for a text-using system, and further, what such a system needs to know about an...

In the last decade, members of the computational linguistics community have adopted a perspective on discourse based primarily on either Rhetorical Structure Theory or Grosz and Sidner’s Theory. However, only recently, researchers have started to investigate the relationship between the two perspectives. In this paper, we use Moser and Moore’s (1996) work as a departure point for extending Marc...

The present research addressed the prosodic realization of global and local text structure and content in the spoken discourse data produced by Persian EFL learners. Two newspaper articles were analyzed using Rhetorical Structure Theory. Based on these analyses, the global structure in terms of hierarchical level, the local structure in terms of the relative importance of text segments and the ...