Ever since the formulation of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) by Mann and Thompson, researchers have debated about what is the ‘right’ number of relations. One proposal is based on the discourse markers (connectives) signalling the presence of a particular relationship. In this paper, I discuss the adequacy of such a proposal, in the light of two different corpus studies: a study of conversat...

Attentional State Theory and Rhetorical Structure Theory are two predominant theories of discourse parsing. Combining these two approaches, in this paper, we describe a novel approach for discourse parsing. The resulting discourse tree structure retains following properties: structure of purpose from Attentional State Theory and relations between sentences from Rhetorical Structure Theory. We d...

This paper addresses semantic ellipsis control in language generation for humancomputer dialogue. For this, the rhetorical structure of the dialogue is used, as well as a repository of facts that are accepted by the recipient of the utterance. Rhetorical structure is represented in the framework of SDRT, where rhetorical relations are grouped in “confirmation” and “contradiction” relations; the...

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...

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...

In this paper we investigate how discourse structure a ects the meanings of words and how the meanings of words a ect discourse structure We integrate three ingredients a theory of discourse structure called sdrt which represents discourse in terms of rhetorical relations that glue together the propositions introduced by the text segments an accom panying theory of discourse attachment called d...

We present the results of several machine learning tasks designed to predict rhetorical relations that hold between clauses in discourse. We demonstrate that organizing rhetorical relations into different granularity categories (based on relative degree of detail) increases average prediction accuracy from 58% to 70%. Accuracy further increases to 80% with the inclusion of clause types. These r...

This paper describes a pedagogical agent that helps children to learn to author structured presentations about explanations of concepts. Using a Rhetorical Structure Theory analysis of a source Web page, the agent performs pedagogical tasks to support the user's understanding of rhetorical relations, stimulates reflection about the relations between the structure of the original text and the st...

This paper contains an investigation of the relationship between rhetorical relations and intentions. Rhetorical relations are claimed to I)e actions, and thus the prolmr objects of intentions, although some relations may occur ])e independent of intentions. Explicit identification of particular relations is shown to I)e not always m~cessary when l.his information~ can be cal)tnred in other way...

Exploiting Rhetorical Relations in Blog Summarization Shamima Mithun, Ph.D. Concordia University, 2012 With the rapid growth of the Social Web, a large amount of informal opinionated texts are available on numerous topics. Natural language tools for automatically analyzing these opinions become necessary to help individuals, organizations, and governments in making timely decisions. A query-bas...