This paper describes a study of the levels at which different rhetorical relations occur in rhetorical structure trees. In a previous empirical study (Williams and Reiter, 2003) of the RST-DT (Rhetorical Structure Theory Discourse Treebank) Corpus (Carlson et al., 2003), we noticed that certain rhetorical relations tended to occur more frequently at higher levels in a rhetorical structure tree,...

Most text displays an internal coherence structure, which can be analyzed as a tree structure of relations that hold between short segments of text. We present a machinelearning governed approach to such an analysis in the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory. Our rhetorical analyzer observes a variety of textual properties, such as cue phrases, part-of-speech information, rhetorical contex...

Rhetorical structure analysis (RSA) explores discourse relations among elementary discourse units (EDUs) in a text. It is very useful in many text processing tasks employing relationships among EDUs such as text understanding, summarization, and question-answering. Thai language with its distinctive linguistic characteristics requires a unique technique. This article proposes an approach for Th...

This paper investigates the usefulness of prosodic features in classifying rhetorical relations between utterances in meeting recordings. Five rhetorical relations of contrast, elaboration, summary, question and cause are explored. Three training methods supervised, unsupervised, and combined are compared, and classification is carried out using support vector machines. The results of this pilo...

The Text2Dialogue (T2D) system that we are developing allows digital content creators to generate attractive multi-modal dialogues presented by two virtual agents—by simply providing textual information as input. We use Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) to decompose text into segments and to identify rhetorical discourse relations between them. These are then “acted out” by two 3D agents using ...

This paper explores the use of a simple and computational optimality theoretic pragmatics (OT pragmatics, OTP) to the analysis of the rhetorical structure of texts. It introduces this variant of OTP briefly and then shows that it can be applied to explain coherence, rhetorical relations, discourse trees and context dependence using the occasional extra premiss. It thereby improves on existing a...

In this article, we propose a novel method for generating engaging multi-modal content automatically from text. Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) is used to decompose text into discourse units and to identify rhetorical discourse relations between them. Rhetorical relations are then mapped to question–answer pairs in an information preserving way, i.e., the original text and the resulting dialo...

This study investigates the prosodic realization of organizational features of texts. Twenty read aloud news reports were annotated according to Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). This theory defines the clustering of elementary units (clauses) into larger segments (hierarchical organization), the relative importance of units (nuclearity) and the rhetorical relations between segments. The proso...

The Text2Dialogue (T2D) system that we are developing allows digital content creators to generate attractive multi-modal dialogues presented by two virtual agents—by simply providing textual information as input. We use Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) to decompose text into segments and to identify rhetorical discourse relations between them. These are then “acted out” by two 3D agents using ...

The Text2Dialogue (T2D) system that we are developing allows digital content creators to generate attractive multi-modal dialogues presented by two virtual agents—by simply providing textual information as input. We use Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) to decompose text into segments and to identify rhetorical discourse relations between them. These are then “acted out” by two 3D agents using ...