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 Maite Taboada. 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 now 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.

The site used to reside elsewhere, but its permanent address is: www.sfu.ca/rst.

News

Older news items

July 2011: Spanish RST Discourse Treebank
A new RST-annotated corpus in Spanish, coordinated by Iria da Cunha. To access the corpus:
http://corpus.iingen.unam.mx/rst/
The paper describing the corpus:
da Cunha, Iria, Juan Manuel Torres-Moreno and Gerardo Sierra (2011) On the development of the RST Spanish Treebank, Proceedings of the Fifth Language and Annotation Workshop (LAW V) (pp. 1-10). Portland, OR.

March 2010: Bibliographies updated
New version of the RST bibliographies. Please send any corrections or additions to Maite Taboada.

May 2009: Introduction to RST slides
A set of slides is available from the Tools page. They are a basic introduction to RST, and can be used in courses or seminars.

November 2008: Discourse Relations Reference Corpus
The Discourse Relations Reference Corpus is a collection of RST-annotated texts compiled by Jan Renkema and Maite Taboada. A description and the full collection are available from the Tools page, or directly through the Discourse Relations Reference Corpus page.