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 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
November 2018: TextLink project
The TextLink Action was a pan-European effort to unify taxonomies and resources around discourse relations. It produced a number of publications and reports, including a portal of discourse resources.
August 2018: Bibliographies no longer updated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 RST Workshop was a success. Proceedings are now available from the ACL Anthology. 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:
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.http://aclweb.org/anthology/N/N16/N16-3001.pdf
March 2016: Papers from the 5th RST Workshop
Some of the papers presented at the 5th RST Workshop in Alicante in September 2015 are now published as part of Volume 56 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.