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 in coherent discourse, every individual utterance is connected by a discourse relation with a context element, e.g., another segment that corresponds to one or more utterances. An alternative view is that discourse relations correspond to the sense (semantic meaning or pragmatic function) of discourse connectives (discourse markers, discourse cues, e.g., conjunctions, certain adverbs), so that every discourse connective elicits at least one discourse relation. Both views converge to some extent in that the same underlying inventory of discourse relations is assumed.
There is no general agreement on the exact inventory of discourse relations, but current inventories are specific to theories or frameworks. With ISO/TS 24617-5 (Semantic annotation framework; Part 5: Discourse structure, SemAF-DS),[1] a standard has been proposed, but it is not widely used in existing annotations or by tools. Yet another proposal to derive at a generalized discourse relation inventory is the cognitive approach to coherence relations (CCR), which reduces discourse relations to a combination of five parameters.[2]
In addition to a discourse relation inventory, some (but not all) theories postulate structural constraints on discourse relations, and if paratactic (coordinate) or hypotactic (subordinate) relations are distinguished that hold across two or more text spans, coherence in discourse can be modelled as a tree (as in RST, see below) or over a tree (as in SDRT, see below).[3]
Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST)
Introduced in 1987, Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST)[4] uses rhetorical relations as a systematic way for an analyst to annotate a given text. An analysis is usually built by reading the text and constructing a tree using the relations. RST has been designed as a framework for the principled annotation discourse, driven by theoretical considerations, but with an applied perspective.
There is some variation among RST relations in different applications and annotated corpora, but the core inventory formulated by Mann and Thompson (1987) is generally considered as the basis.[4]
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
- ^ 14:00-17:00. "ISO/TS 24617-5:2014". ISO. Retrieved 2022-05-02.
{{cite web}}:|last=has numeric name (help) - ^ Hoek, Jet; Evers-Vermeul, Jacqueline; Sanders, Ted J. M. (2019-10-18). "Using the Cognitive Approach to Coherence Relations for Discourse Annotation". Dialogue & Discourse. 10 (2): 1–33. doi:10.5087/dad.2019.201. ISSN 2152-9620.
- ^ 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 Mann, William C.; Thompson, Sandra A. (1987), Kempen, Gerard (ed.), "Rhetorical Structure Theory: Description and Construction of Text Structures", Natural Language Generation: New Results in Artificial Intelligence, Psychology and Linguistics, Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, pp. 85–95, doi:10.1007/978-94-009-3645-4_7, ISBN 978-94-009-3645-4, retrieved 2022-05-02
- ^ 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
 | This sociolinguistics article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
| This semantics article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |