RSTTool 2.4 - A markup Tool for Rhetorical Structure Theory

Summary

RSTTool 2.4 is a graphical program for annotating the rhetorical organization of texts under Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST; Mann and Thompson 1988). It also handles constituency-style schematic analyses such as Hasan's Generic Structure Potential (GSP). The tool targets a practical gap: RST analyses had mostly been produced by hand, which made corpora slow to build and hard to share or check. Written in Tcl/Tk, it runs on Windows, Macintosh, UNIX and LINUX and has four interfaces:

segmentation, with automatic sentence splitting that users then correct by clicking;
structuring, where users drag from satellite to nucleus, with multinuclear relations, scoping, schemas and collapsible subtrees;
a relation editor;
a statistics view.

Compared with the 1997 version, it adds GUI-based relation management, frequency statistics, EPS/printer output, XML storage and more flexible restructuring. It is also sturdier after extensive debugging by Bill Mann. The tool supports corpus studies for text generation, replication of analyses, figure preparation and teaching.

Key points

Supports plain RST relations (e.g., Circumstance, Motivation), multinuclear ones (Joint, Sequence, Conjunction), scoping over spans, and GSP-like schemas mixed with RST trees.
The statistics interface counts each relation and gives the ratio of nucleus-first to satellite-first orderings.
Analyses are saved as XML, and diagrams can be exported as EPS for LaTeX.
Renaming or deleting a relation in the editor propagates through the current analysis.
Planned work includes integrating automatic RST recognition (Marcu 1997) to produce draft structures for human correction.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Topics: Discourse analysis

Cited by

24 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 3 of them have a page here, 21 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3115/1118253.1118290

@inproceedings{odonnell2000rsttool,
  title = {{RSTTool 2.4 - A markup Tool for Rhetorical Structure Theory}},
  author = {O'Donnell, Michael},
  booktitle = {INLG'2000 Proceedings of the First International Conference on Natural Language Generation},
  year = {2000},
  doi = {10.3115/1118253.1118290},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/1118253.1118290}
}

References

4 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

Ruqaiya Hasan. 1996. The nursery tale as a genre. In Carmel Cloran, David Butt, and Geoff Williams, editors, Ways of Saying: Ways of Meaning. Cassell, London. Previously published in Nottingham Linguistics Circular 13, 1984. find
W.C. Mann and S. Thompson. 1988. Rhetorical structure theory: Toward a functional theory of text organization. Text, 8(3):243-281. find our card
Daniel Marcu. 1997. The rhetorical parsing of natural language texts. In The Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, (A CL '97lEA CL '97), pages 96-103, Madrid, Spain, July 7-10. find
Michael O'Donnell. 1997. Rst-tool: An rst analysis tool. In Proceedings off the 6th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation, pages 92 - 96, Gerhard-Mercator University, Duisburg, Germany, March 24 - 26. find

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