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...

Jan Renkema, in his Introduction to Discourse Studies, describes current research in coherence relations (also called rhetorical or discourse relations), and lists a few open questions in that area. One of the most important issues, from both a theoretical and applied point of view, is the signaling of relations, that is, the explicit marking of the presence of a relation. In this paper, I ques...

Elaboration or Narration, as so-called discourse relations (or rhetorical relations), are modelled in Segmented Discourse Structure Theory (SDRT) as relations between discourse constituents (or constituents for short). These are either propositions that come into being by interpretation of sentences occurring in a text; the propositions then have the status of DRSes. Or, constituents are compou...

This study shares the view that reference in discourse is influenced by the distance to prior mentions of the referent in the discourse. Kibrik (1996, 1999) suggested a measurement of rhetorical distance to assess this factor. In this paper we address three complications created by that methodology when applied to a large corpus of written newspaper texts. These problems include: difference bet...

A method is described by which a rhetorical-structure tree can be realized by a text structure made up of sections, paragraphs, sentences, vertical lists, and other textual patterns, with discourse connectives added (in the correct positions) to mark rhetorical relations. We show that text-structuring can be formulated as a Constraint Satisfaction Problem , so that all solutions respecting cons...

Ontology authoring is a specialised task requiring amongst other things a deep knowledge of the ontology language being used. Understanding and reusing ontologies can thus be difficult for domain experts, who tend not to be ontology experts. To address this problem, we have developed a Natural Language Generation system for transforming the axioms that form the definitions of ontology classes i...

This paper addresses discourse structure from the perspective of understanding. It would perhaps help us understand the nature of discourse relations if we better understood what units of a text can be related to one another. In one major theory of discourse structure, Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann & Thompson 1988; hereafter simply RST), the smallest possible linguistic units that can parti...

The ADROIT system that we are developing allows automatic discourse analysis of information rich natural language texts extracted directly from the web. We use guidelines and relations of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) to decompose texts into elementary segments and to perform the discourse parsing between them. In this paper, we present version 1.0 of ADROIT and focus on the noble technique...

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...

In this paper, we focus on the way how the rhetorical discourse structure of texts, in terms of coherence relations, and different types of referring expressions depend on each other. In particular, we concentrate on the impact the resolution of anaphora has on the derivation of coherence relations. We introduce an algorithm which combines such analyses and provide a preliminary evaluation of i...