With this analogy, I view rhetorical relations as realization of intentions. Furthermore, this analogy leads me to believe that rhetorical relations should be as numerous and varied as there are relations among actions and objects in the domain. This view seems to be in conflict with Dale's view (in this proceedings) which argues that rhetorical relation should only include textual relations ra...

Sequence Models and Ranking Methods for Discourse Parsing A dissertation presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts by Ben Wellner Many important aspects of natural language reside beyond the level of a single sentence or clause, at the level of the discourse, including: reference relations such anaphora, notions of topic/...

RASTA (Rhetorical Structure Theory Analyzer), a system for automatic discourse analysis, reliably, identifies rhetorical relations present m written discourse by examining information available in syntactic and logical form analyses. Since there is a many-to-many relationship between rhetorical relations and elements of linguistic form, RASTA identifies relations by the convergence of a number ...

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,...

Many of previous research have proven that the usage of rhetorical relations is capable to enhance many applications such as text summarization, question answering and natural language generation. This work proposes an approach that expands the benefit of rhetorical relations to address redundancy problem in text summarization. We first examined and redefined the type of rhetorical relations th...

Many of previous research have proven that the usage of rhetorical relations is capable to enhance many applications such as text summarization, question answering and natural language generation. This work proposes an approach that expands the benefit of rhetorical relations to address redundancy problem for cluster-based text summarization of multiple documents. We exploited rhetorical relati...

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...

Persuasion is an emerging topic in the field of Human Computer Interaction: persuasion functions will improve the effectiveness of intelligent interfaces. The focus of this paper regards how persuasion affects Rhetorical Relation (RR) selection in the generation of an effective, and context-adapted, message. Using a taxonomy of persuasive strategies, together with a reasoning model, a tree-like...

We report results of experiments which build and refine models of rhetoricalsemantic relations such as Cause and Contrast. We adopt the approach of Marcu and Echihabi (2002), using a small set of patterns to build relation models, and extend their work by refining the training and classification process using parameter optimization, topic segmentation and syntactic parsing. Using human-annotate...

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...