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...

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...

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,...

Explaining why the same passage may have different rhetorical structures when conveyed in different languages remains an open question. Starting from a trilingual translation corpus, this paper aims to provide a new qualitative method for the comparison of rhetorical structures in different languages and to specify why translated texts may differ in their rhetorical structures. To achieve these...

Rhetorical structuring is field approached mostly by research in natural language (pragmatic) interpretation. However, in natural language generation (NLG) the rhetorical structure plays an important part, in monologues and dialogues as well. Hence, several approaches in this direction exist. In most of these, the rhetorical structure is calculated and built in the framework of Rhetorical Struc...

This study was set to reveal how second language learners use rhetorical relations in their written narratives in terms of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) primarily proposed by Mann & Thompson (1987) and developed by Mann, Matthiessen & Thompson (1992). To this end, sixty written narratives based on the picture story book ‘Frog, where are you?’ were collected from EFL learners and were put to...

Abstract Although flourishing research has been devoted to research on article abstracts, more studies are needed to unpack the relationship between rhetorical moves and their associated linguistic and rhetorical features (e.g., metadiscourse). To underpin this relationship, the current study analyzed a total of 60 research article abstracts written in English by two cultural groups in three di...