This is a site
devoted to the linguistic topic of
Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST).
It was created by Bill Mann, and it
is maintained by . It is intended as a
resource for those who would like to
learn, use, understand, refute,
supersede, admire, or question RST.
RST raises issues
about communication, semantics, and
especially the nature of the
coherence of texts. This site is
intended to show how some of these
questions arise, identify some of
the questions and provide data on
them in the form of RST analyses.
RST has been used in a
variety of ways, including computer
generation of text, as a prompting
for the development of linguistic
theory, as a guide to text analyzers
for summarization, teaching writing
skills and as an analysis framework
for a wide variety of kinds of text.
The
website includes introductions to
RST in French and Spanish as well
as English, access to manual and
programmed tools for analysts
(including the definitions of the
RST relations, also in French and
Spanish as well as English),
download capabilities, a door into
text generation as applied RST, a
set of open questions (ideas for
research topics) and more.
Recent updates
September
2024: Enhanced RST
New Enhanced RST site at
Georgetown University:
The site contains information
about improvements and additions
to some of the relations, based on
corpus work from .
January
2024: Archive only
The site is now mostly an
archive. The definitions are still
valid, but will not be updated.
The bibliography and projects have
not been updated in a few years.
We hope the site is still useful
for practitioners of RST. Do write
with updates and suggestions for
improvements.
Older
November
2018: TextLink
project
The was a pan-European
effort to unify taxonomies and
resources around discourse
relations. It produced a number of
publications and reports,
including .
August
2018: Bibliographies no longer
updated
The bibliographies on this site
will no longer be updated. Recent
work on RST can easily be found on
Google Scholar and similar search
platforms.
October
2017: RST Workshop
The recent was a success.
Proceedings are now available from
the . Stay tuned for
the 2019 edition!
Suggested
guidelines for RST Annotation
As part of a project on
comparing RST annotations, we have
created a set of guidelines for
annotations:
Stede, M., M. Taboada and D.
Das (2017) . Manuscript.
University of Potsdam and Simon
Fraser University. March 2017.
August
2017: Updated bibliographies
New version of the RST
bibliographies. Please send
any corrections or additions to .
August
2017: 6th RST Workshop,
accepted papers
The list of accepted papers and
program for the is available .
March 2017:
6th RST Workshop
We are pleased to announce that
the will take place
on September 4, 2017, in
conjunction with the in Santiago de
Compostela, Spain. The is available from
the workshop site.
August
2016: New tool for RST
analysis and corpus
rstWeb - an online and local
annotation tool for RST:
GUM - a multilayer corpus
containing (among other things)
RST analyses for 54 documents and
counting
Descriptions of tool and corpus
from the following publications:
Zeldes, Amir (2016) "The GUM
Corpus: Creating Multilayer
Resources in the Classroom". Language
Resources and Evaluation.
Zeldes, Amir (2016) "rstWeb
- A Browser-based Annotation
Interface for Rhetorical
Structure Theory and Discourse
Relations". In: Proceedings
of NAACL-HLT 2016 System
Demonstrations. San
Diego, CA, 1-5.
March
2016: Papers from
the 5th RST Workshop
Some of the papers presented at
the in Alicante in
September 2015 are now published
as part of of the Journal of the
Spanish Association for Natural
Language Processing.
The next RST Workshop will
probably take place in 2017. Stay
tuned for details.
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