Discourse relation

A discourse relation (or rhetorical relation) is a description of how two segments of discourse are logically connected to one another.

One method of modeling discourse is called Segmented discourse representation theory (SDRT).

SDRT

Asher and Lascarides categorize the discourse relations formalized in SDRT into five classes.

Metatalk relations

• Consequence*(α,β)
• Explanation*(α,β)
• Explanation*_q(α,β)
• Result*(α,β)

See also

• Speech act
• Contrast (linguistics)

Bibliography

• Asher, Nicholas and Alex Lascarides (2003). Logics of Conversation. Studies in Natural Language Processing. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521650585
• 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
• Discourse relations — PowerPoint slides by Kôiti Hasida