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

September 2024: Enhanced RST

• New Enhanced RST site at Georgetown University: https://gucorpling.org/erst/
  The site contains information about improvements and additions to some of the relations, based on corpus work from GUM.

January 2024: Archive only

• The site is now mostly an archive. The definitions are still valid, but will not be updated. The bibliography and projects have not been updated in a few years. We hope the site is still useful for practitioners of RST. Do write with updates and suggestions for improvements.

Older

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August 2018: Bibliographies no longer updated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:
  
• Stede, M., M. Taboada and D. Das (2017) Annotation Guidelines for Rhetorical Structure. Manuscript. University of Potsdam and Simon Fraser University. March 2017.

August 2017: Updated bibliographies

• New version of the RST bibliographies. Please send any corrections or additions to Maite Taboada.

August 2017: 6th RST Workshop, accepted papers

• The list of accepted papers and program for the 6th Workshop on RST and Related Formalisms is available online.

March 2017: 6th RST Workshop

• We are pleased to announce that the 6th Workshop on RST and Related Formalisms will take place on September 4, 2017, in conjunction with the International Conference on Natural Language Generation in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. The call for papers is available from the workshop site.

August 2016: New tool for RST analysis and corpus

• rstWeb - an online and local annotation tool for RST: https://corpling.uis.georgetown.edu/rstweb/info/
• GUM - a multilayer corpus containing (among other things) RST analyses for 54 documents and counting https://corpling.uis.georgetown.edu/gum/
• Descriptions of tool and corpus from the following publications:
  • Zeldes, Amir (2016) "The GUM Corpus: Creating Multilayer Resources in the Classroom". Language Resources and Evaluation. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10579-016-9343-x
  • 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.