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

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.

July 2008: Various updates to the site:
- New versions of the RST bibliographies.
- A pdf version of a technical report on RST that had only been available as image files.
- Other links and references have been updated.