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RST Topics:

This page leads to these RST topics:

Rhetorical Structure Theory is an approach to discovering the structure of written texts. I have a web site that tells about it. It includes the scope and a bit of the history of the development, some tools, bibliographies and related material. It is at

http://www.sil.org/linguistics/RST/
There is also an email discussion group (with message archives) devoted to RST. It is described, along with directions for joining it, on the web site, which is at

http://www.sil.org/linguistics/RST/listnote.htm

I hope that the SIL web site will tell you all of the important things about RST that might otherwise appear here. Only a few loose ends for RST are on this web site. My own papers appear here rather than there. See the section of this website on my publications.

In early 2001 there was an experiment on supporting classroom teaching of RST using the Internet. The basic idea was that anyone could submit an analysis using the RST analysis tool, and the analyses could then be discussed by the RST-List email discussion group. Students submitted a number of analyses of poetic texts, which were posted and are here. Very little discussion actually took place, so there was little immediate effect of posting the analyses. Thus the posting did not have much direct value. Posting also took more effort than expected. As a result, the offer to post analyses is closed, and the experiment will not be repeated in the same form.

To see the directions for posting, and to access 15 analyses by students and 2 analyses by faculty (Steen, Bateman), click here.

Deletions from the 1988 Paper

When the definitive expression of RST was published in Text, 8 (3), space limitations forced us to drop the review of related prior developments, that had appeared in the report version of the document. Also, the examples of most of the relations were dropped.

These deletions were perhaps necessary, but the effects of them has been unfortunate. Many of the matters that were clarified in the dropped sections later became points of misunderstanding. Of course, the art has moved on, and some details of the old report would be different now. But many would not, and the stances represented by the original report are worth understanding and sometimes arguing about.

The original pages (the ones carrying substantial expansions on the Text 8 (3) version) containing these missing elements , are in the process of appearing here, (mostly here now), along with the title page and table of contents, a total of 51 pages.

That report, which was ISI/RS-87-190, indicated that it would appear in The Structure of Discourse , Livia Polanyi, ed., Ablex, 1987. However, that book never appeared. References to the internal technical report, and the erroneous reference to the Polanyi book, still appear in the literature from time to time. They should be replaced by a reference to the Text paper, possibly with reference to the added information linked above.


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