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...

Scott and Souza (1990) have posed the problem of how a rhetorical structure (in which propositions are linked by rhetorical relations, but not yet arranged in a linear order) can be realized by a text structure (in which propositions are ordered and linked up by appropriate discourse connectives). Almost all work on this problem assumes, implicitly or explicitly, that this mapping is governed b...

The present paper focused on the sociocultural explanations of rhetorical differences between English and Persian and was based on the contrastive genre analysis of Applied Linguistics research article abstracts in these two languages. The evolutionary nature of research article abstracts was also investigated from 1985 to 2005, in three stages, with a time interval of 10 years. Seventy eight r...

This paper discusses a fundamental problem in natural language generation: how to organize the content of a text in a coherent and natural way. In this research, we set out to determine the semantic content and the rhetorical structure of texts and to develop heuristics to perform this process automatically within a text generation framework. The study was performed on a specific language and t...

Rhetorical structure theory (RST) provides a model of textual function based upon rhetoric. Initially developed as a model of text coherence, RST has been used extensively in text generation research, and has more recently been proposed as a basis for multimedia presentation generation. This paper investigates the use of RST for generating video presentations having a rhetorical form, using mod...

We present a tagging schema and a tagging tool for labeling the rhetorical structure of texts. We focus on presenting the difficulties that we faced in designing a discourse annotation manual and on discussing the choices that we made in order to address these difficulties. We report reliability results concerning our agreement on building the rhetorical structure of 90 texts of three genres: 3...

Discourse markers foreshadow the message thrust of texts and saliently guide their rhetorical structure which are important for content filtering and text abstraction. This paper reports on efforts to automatically identify and classify discourse markers in Chinese texts using heuristic-based and corpus-based data-mining methods, as an integral part of automatic text summarization via rhetorica...

RASTA (Rhetorical Structure Theory Analyzer), a discourse analysis component within the Microsoft English Grammar, efficiently computes representations of the structure of written discourse using information available in syntactic and logical form analyses. RASTA heuristically scores the rhetorical relations that it hypothesizes, using those scores to guide it in producing more plausible discou...

This paper addresses discourse structure from the perspective of understanding. It would perhaps help us understand the na,ture of discourse relatiolls il" we better understood what units of a text. can be related to one a.nother. In Olle ma.jor theory of discourse structure, Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann &: Thompson 1988; Imrea.l'ter simply RS'T), the smallest possible linguistic units tha...

In this paper, we propose a Connectivedriven Dependency Tree (CDT) scheme to represent the discourse rhetorical structure in Chinese language, with elementary discourse units as leaf nodes and connectives as non-leaf nodes, largely motivated by the Penn Discourse Treebank and the Rhetorical Structure Theory. In particular, connectives are employed to directly represent the hierarchy of the tree...