Discourse relation
A discourse relation (also coherence relation or rhetorical relation) is a description of how two segments of discourse are logically and/or structurally connected to one another. A widely upheld position is that coherence in text is established through relations that connect every individual utterance with a context element, e.g., another segment that corresponds to one or more utterances. Some (but not all) theories postulate structural constrains, and it paratactic (coordinate) or hypotactic (subordinate) relations are distinguished that hold across two or more text spans, a coherent discourse can be modelled as a tree (as in RST, see below) or over a tree (as in SDRT, see below).[1]
Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST)
Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) uses rhetorical relations as a systematic way for an analyst to analyse the text. An analysis is usually built by reading the text and constructing a tree using the relations.
Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT)
In its original motivation, SDRT attempts to complement Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) with RST-style discourse relations. Asher and Lascarides (2003) categorize SDRT discourse relations into several classes:
- Content-level relations
- Text structuring relations
- Divergent relations
- Metatalk relations
Metatalk relations include:
See also
Notes and references
- ^ Taboada, Maite (2009). "Implicit and explicit coherence relations" (PDF). In Renkema, Jan (ed.). Discourse, of course: an overview of research in discourse studies. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. pp. 127–140. doi:10.1075/z.148.13tab. ISBN 9789027232588. OCLC 276996573.
- ^ a b c d Asher and Lascarides (2003): 333
Bibliography
- Asher, Nicholas and Alex Lascarides (2003). Logics of Conversation. Studies in Natural Language Processing. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-65058-5
- Pitler, Emily and others (2008). "Easily Identifiable Discourse Relations". University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Science Technical Report No. MS-CIS-08-24.
- Grosz, Barbara J. and Candice L. Sidner (1986). "Attention, Intentions, and the Structure of Discourse". Computational Linguistics 12: 175–204. [aka DSM]
- Alistair Knott, 'An Algorithmic Framework for Specifying the Semantics of Discourse Relations', Computational Intelligence 16 (2000).
- Mann, William C. and Sandra A .Thompson (1988). "Rhetorical Structure Theory: A theory of text organization". Text 8: 243–281. [aka RST]
External links
- Rhetorical Structure Theory — RST website, created by William C. Mann, maintained by Maite Taboada
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