In this position paper, we argue Ibr the need for a generation system to represent communicative goals (i.e., goals that express the speaker's intent to aflect the bearer's mental attitudes), at least if certain tasks are to be achieved. We lurther argue that, wlfile rhetorical relations might be recoverable t tom other Iactors, they appear to be a useful level of abstraction to maintain about ...

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 ...

Citations in scientific writing fulfil an important role in creating relationships among mutually relevant articles within a research field. These inter-article relationships reinforce the argumentation structure intrinsic to all scientific writing. Therefore, determining the nature of the exact relationship between a citing and cited paper requires an understanding of the rhetorical relations ...

Citations in scientific writing fulfil an important role in creating relationships among mutually relevant articles within a research field. These inter-article relationships reinforce the argumentation structure intrinsic to all scientific writing. Therefore, determining the nature of the exact relationship between a citing and cited paper requires an understanding of the rhetorical relations ...

The goal of this paper is to challenge some of tile assumptions that have been inherent in much of the research on discourse relations, especially that which has gone on in the context of text planning. The primary assumption has been that there is only one set of relations, encompassing structural, rhetorical, and intentional information. The second assumption is that these relations only oper...

Coherent texts are not just simple sequences of clauses and sentences, but rather complex artifacts that have highly elaborate rhetorical structure. This paper explores the extent to which well-formed rhetorical structures can be automatically derived by means of surface-form-based algorithms. These algorithms identify discourse usages of cue phrases and break sentences into clauses, hypothesiz...

Annotation efforts have resulted in the availability of a number of corpora with rhetorical relation information. The corpora, unfortunately, are annotated under different theoretical approaches and have different hierarchies of relations. In addition, new sets of rhetorical relations have been proposed to account for language variation. The types of relations, however, tend to overlap or be re...

This paper presents DiZer, an automatic DIscourse analyZER for Brazilian Portuguese. Given a source text, the system automatically produces its corresponding rhetorical analysis, following Rhetorical Structure Theory – RST (Mann and Thompson, 1987). A rhetorical repository, which is DiZer main component, makes the automatic analysis possible. This repository, produced by means of a corpus analy...

A study of a small corpus of pharmaceutical leaflets supports the hypothesis that a subset of Mann and Thompson’s Rhetorical Relations may hold within as well as between clauses, with one or more propositional arguments nominalised. This paper summarises the main results of this study and outlines a formal account of the phenomenon within a framework of discourse generation, whereby nominalisat...

I use the distinction between the nuclei and the satellites that pertain to discourse relations to introduce a compositionality criterion for discourse trees. I provide a first-order formalization of rhetorical structure trees and, on its basis, I derive an algorithm that constructs all the valid rhetorical trees that can be associated with a given discourse.