Rhetorical structure theory

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Rhetorical structure theory (RST) is a theory of text organization that describes relations that hold between parts of text. It was originally developed by William Mann, Sandra Thompson, Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen and others at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute (ISI) and defined in a 1988 paper.[1][2][3] The theory was developed as part of studies of computer-based text generation. Natural language researchers later began using RST in text summarization and other applications. It explains coherence by postulating a hierarchical, connected structure of texts.[3] In 2000, Daniel Marcu, also of ISI, demonstrated that practical discourse parsing and text summarization also could be achieved using RST.[4][5][6]

  1. ^ Mann, William C.; Thompson, Sandra A. (1988). "Rhetorical structure theory: toward a functional theory of text organization" (PDF). Text: Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse. 8 (3): 243–281. doi:10.1515/text.1.1988.8.3.243. S2CID 60514661. Retrieved 1 November 2017.
  2. ^ Matthiessen, Christian M. I. M. (June 2005). "Remembering Bill Mann". Computational Linguistics. 31 (2): 161–171. doi:10.1162/0891201054224002. S2CID 19688915. Retrieved 1 November 2017.
  3. ^ a b Taboada, Maite; Mann, William C. (June 2006). "Rhetorical structure theory: looking back and moving ahead" (PDF). Discourse Studies. 8 (3): 423–459. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.216.381. doi:10.1177/1461445606061881. S2CID 2386531.
  4. ^ Marcu, Daniel (2000). The theory and practice of discourse parsing and summarization. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0262133722. OCLC 43811223.
  5. ^ Carlson, Lynn; Marcu, Daniel; Okurowski, Mary Ellen (2003) [2001]. "Building a discourse-tagged corpus in the framework of rhetorical structure theory" (PDF). In Kuppevelt, Jan van; Smith, Ronnie W. (eds.). Current and new directions in discourse and dialogue. Text, speech, and language technology. Vol. 22. Dordrecht; Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 85–112. doi:10.1007/978-94-010-0019-2_5. ISBN 978-1402016141. OCLC 53097055.
  6. ^ "Timeline". isi.edu. Information Sciences Institute. Retrieved 1 November 2017.