Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Disambiguating Rhetorical Structure

  • Published:
Research on Language and Computation

Abstract

Empirical studies of text coherence often use tree-like structures in the spirit of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) as representational device. This paper identifies several sources of ambiguity in RST-inspired trees and argues that such structures are therefore not as explanatory as a text representation should be. As an alternative, an approach toward multi-level annotation (MLA) of texts is proposed, which separates the information into distinct levels of representation, in particular: referential structure, thematic structure, conjunctive relations, and intentional structure. Levels are conceptually built upon each other, and human annotators can produce them using a dedicated software environment. We argue that the resulting multi-level corpora are descriptively more adequate, and as a resource are more useful than RST-style treebanks.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Asher N., Lascarides A. (2003) Logics of conversation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Bateman J. (2001) Between the leaves of rhetorical structure: static and dynamic aspects of discourse organization. Verbum 23(1): 31–58

    Google Scholar 

  • Bateman J., Rondhuis K.J. (1997) “Coherence relations”: Towards a general specification. Discourse Processes 24(1): 3–50

    Google Scholar 

  • Brandt M., Rosengren I. (1992) Zur Illokutionsstruktur von Texten. Zeitschrift fr Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 86: 9–51

    Google Scholar 

  • Brants S., Dipper S., Eisenberg P., Hansen S., König E., Lezius W., Rohrer C., Smith G., Uszkoreit H. (2004) TIGER: Linguistic interpretation of a german corpus. Research on Language and Computation 2(4): 597–620

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Brants, T., & Plaehn, O. (2000). Interactive corpus annotation. In Proceedings of Second International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-2000). Athens.

  • Carlson, L., & Marcu, D. (2001). Discourse tagging reference manual. Technical report, University of Southern California/ISI.

  • Carlson L., Marcu D., Okurowski M.E. (2003) Building a discourse-tagged corpus in the framework of rhetorical structure theory. In: van Kuppevelt J., Smith R. (eds) Current directions in discourse and dialogue. Kluwer, Dordrecht

    Google Scholar 

  • Chiarcos, C., Dipper, S., Götze, M., Ritz, J., & Stede, M. (2008). A flexible framework for integrating annotations from different tools and tagsets. In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Global Interoperability for Language Resources. Hongkong.

  • Dipper, S. (2005). XML-based stand-off representation and exploitation of multi-level linguistic annotation. In R. Eckstein & R. Tolksdorf (Eds.), Proceedings of Berliner XML Tage (pp. 39–50). Berlin: Humboldt University.

  • Figge, U. L. (1971). Syntagmatik, Distribution und Text. In W.-D. Stempel (Ed.), Beiträge zur Textlinguistik (pp. 161–181). München.

  • Freeman J.B. (1991) Dialectics and the macrostructure of argument. Foris, Berlin

    Google Scholar 

  • Grosz B., Sidner C. (1986) Attention, intentions, and the structure of discourse. Computational Linguistics 12(3): 175–204

    Google Scholar 

  • Jasinskaja, K., Mayer, J., Boethke, J., Neumann, A., Peldszus, A., & Rodríguez, K. J. (2007). Discourse Tagging Guidelines for German Radio News and Newspaper Commentaries. Ms., Universität Potsdam.

  • Kehler A. (2002) Coherence, reference, and the theory of grammar. CSLI Publications, Stanford

    Google Scholar 

  • Knott A., Oberlander J., O’Donnell M., Mellish C. (2001) Beyond elaboration: The interaction of relations and focus in coherent text. In: Sanders T., Schilperoord J., Spooren W. (eds) Text representation: Linguistic and psycholinguistic aspects. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp 181–196

    Google Scholar 

  • Krasavina, O., & Chiarcos, C. (2007). PoCoS: The Potsdam Coreference Scheme. In Proceedings of the Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW) at ACL-07. Prague.

  • Lötscher A. (1987) Text und Thema. Studien zur thematischen Konstituenz von Texten. Niemeyer, Tübingen

    Google Scholar 

  • Mann W., Thompson S. (1988) Rhetorical structure theory: Towards a functional theory of text organization. TEXT 8: 243–281

    Google Scholar 

  • Marcu D. (2000) The theory and practice of discourse parsing and summarization. MIT Press, Cambridge/MA

    Google Scholar 

  • Martin J.R. (1992) English text: System and structure. John Benjamins, Philadelphia/Amsterdam

    Google Scholar 

  • Matthiessen C., Thompson S. (1988) The structure of discourse and ‘subordination’. In: Haiman J., Thompson S. (eds) Clause combining in grammar and discourse. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp 275–329

    Google Scholar 

  • Moore J., Pollack M. (1992) A problem for RST: The need for multi-level discourse analysis. Computational Linguistics 18(4): 537–544

    Google Scholar 

  • Moser, M., & Moore, J. (1995). Using discourse analysis and automatic text generation to study discourse cue usage. In AAAI Spring Symposium on Empirical Methods in Discourse Interpretation and Generation, pp. 92–98.

  • Müller C., Strube M. (2006) Multi-level annotation of linguistic data with MMAX2. In: Braun S., Kohn K., Mukherjee J. (eds) Corpus technology and language pedagogy. Peter Lang, Frankfurt, pp 197–214

    Google Scholar 

  • O’Donnell, M. (2000). RSTTool 2.4—a markup tool for rhetorical structure theory. In Proceedings of the International Natural Language Generation Conference (pp. 253–256). Mizpe Ramon/Israel.

  • Poesio, M. (2004). The MATE/GNOME proposals for anaphoric annotation, revisited. In Proceedings of the SIGDIAL ’04 Workshop. Cambridge/MA: Association for Computational Linguistics.

  • Poesio M., Stevenson R., di Eugenio B., Hitzeman J. (2004) Centering: A parametric theory and its instantiations. Computational Linguistics 30(3): 309–363

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Polanyi L. (1988) A formal model of the structure of discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 12: 601–638

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Prasad, R., Miltsakaki, E., Joshi, A., & Webber, B. (2004). Annotation and data mining of the Penn discourse Treebank. In Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Discourse Annotation. Barcelona.

  • Redeker, G., & Egg, M. (2006). Says who? On the treatment of speech attributions in discourse structure. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Constraints in Discourse. Maynooth University/Ireland.

  • Sanders T., Spooren W. (1999) Communicative intentions and coherence relations. In: Sanders T., Schilperoord J., Spooren W. (eds) Coherence in Spoken and Written Discourse. Benjamins, Amsterdam

    Google Scholar 

  • Sanders T., Spooren W., Noordman L. (1992) Toward a taxonomy of coherence relations. Discourse Processes 15: 1–35

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Schmidt T. (2004) EXMARaLDA-ein System zur computergestützten Diskurstranskription. In: Mehler A., Lobin H. (eds) Automatische Textanalyse. Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden, pp 203–218

    Google Scholar 

  • Schmitt H. (2000) Zur Illokutionsanalyse monologischer Texte. Peter Lang, Frankfurt

    Google Scholar 

  • Searle J.R. (1976) A classification of illocutionary acts. Language in Society 5: 1–23

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stede M. (2004) Kontrast im Diskurs. In: Blühdorn H., Breindl E., Wassner H. (eds) Brücken schlagen. Grundlagen der Konnektorensemantik. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, pp 255–286

    Google Scholar 

  • Stede M. (2008) RST revisited: Disentangling nuclearity. In: Fabricius-Hansen C., Ramm W. (eds) ‘Subordination’ versus ‘coordination’ in sentence and text. John Benjamins, Amsterdam

    Google Scholar 

  • Stede, M., & Heintze, S. (2004). Machine-assisted rhetorical structure annotation. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (pp. 425–431). Geneva.

  • Taboada M., Mann W. (2006) Rhetorical structure theory: Looking back and moving ahead. Discourse Studies 8(4): 423–459

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Toulmin S. (1958) The uses of argument. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • van Dijk T. (1977) Text and context. Explorations in the semantics and pragmatics of discourse. Klett, London, NY

    Google Scholar 

  • Webber B., Stone M., Joshi A., Knott A. (2003) Anaphora and discourse Structure. Computational Linguistics 29(4): 545–587

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wolf F., Gibson E. (2005) Representing discourse coherence: A corpus-based study. Computational Linguistics 31(2): 249–287

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Linguistics, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

    Manfred Stede

Authors
  1. Manfred Stede
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Manfred Stede.

About this article

Cite this article

Stede, M. Disambiguating Rhetorical Structure. Res on Lang and Comput 6, 311–332 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11168-008-9053-7

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11168-008-9053-7

Keywords

Search

Navigation