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Welcome to the RST Web Site

Topic Links:

This 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 list of ongoing projects, a door into text generation as applied RST, a set of open questions (ideas for research topics) and more. It was updated in January, 2001.

This is a site devoted to the linguistic topic of Rhetorical Structure Theory . It is maintained by Bill Mann. It is intended as a growing 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. In coming months I expect to exhibit how such 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. I expect to develop specialized bibliographies on some of these topics, with the help of folks in the RST discussion group (see below).


An abstract from Scientific American

Click on one of these for more information:

A note about the diagrams: RST diagrams are inherently large, especially when they include the whole text being analyzed. Most of the full diagrams of larger texts will require scrolling in order to see the whole diagram. Generally it will help for you to set your screen to the highest resolution you have available. (Note that many of the largest diagrams are accompanied by one-page views of their upper parts.) We regret the inconvenience, but it seems necessary if the diagrams are to be read. In some cases this is relieved where the top few levels are available separately as a one-screen diagram.

In order to download a diagram, depending on your browser, you may be able to do a right click to get a separate window, and then a Control-S while pointing to the diagram. This may help you to view or print diagrams.

If you are using Netscape, it is possible to open the analysis diagrams in a separate window. Right click on the diagram.

If the print is too small or too big, most browsers will adjust to any of about 6 sizes, and on some browsers many more, and the setting will persist across pages. Use ctl-] to enlarge and ctl-[ to reduce.

Revised: Printing the diagrams, even the largest ones is now possible. There are some difficulties and complexities, and so I am not quite ready to give a method. It would be much easier if there was software, free for downloading by everyone, that was able to change the scale of diagrams represented as Postscript files. If you know of such software, please contact me.

The site relies on frames and other somewhat recent features of HTML. If you have problems, please send me a message at the address below, telling me what browser you are using. I probably can't accommodate every browser, but I need to know what the problems are in order to fix what I can.

A note concerning the bibliography images: The citation images are fuzzy. Also, they are cryptic. I am sorry about that, but the energy and priority to upgrade from that are not available. If they are not useful, they still may indicate the existence of things that could be found by a reference librarian.

An Acknowledgement: In addition to the people mentioned in the introduction, we are grateful for contributions by John Bateman, Susanna Cumming, Cecelia Ford, Barbara Fox, Peter Fries, Ed Hovy and Bob Kasper.

This website is hosted by SIL, but Bill Mann is fully responsible for the contents, both form and content. He is providing the information here as a service to the whole community of linguists, people engaged in other communication sciences, and other interested persons. It is copyrighted by him to discourage abuse. His recent publications do not appear here, but rather on a personal linguistic website, not named here, that can be found by most any popular search engine. As an organization, SIL is not responsible for this content, nor was it prepared under its direction. It is not in any sense a publication of SIL. SIL is a gracious provider of web space and maintenance, serving the community.

We gratefully acknowledge SIL's provision of electronic resources. To learn more about SIL you can go to their home page: SIL

Contact Bill Mann at bill_mann@sil.org .

tarnation


This entire website: © 2000, 2001 William C. Mann

Modified: January, 2001


[  RST home page  ] [  intro to RST  ] [  French pages  ][  Spanish pages  ] [  tools  ] [  text generation  ]
[  published analyses  ] [  unpublished analyses  ]
[  bibliographies  ] [  downloading  ] [  ongoing projects  ] [  research topics  ] [  email list  ] [  discussion archives  ]


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