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rstWeb - A Browser-based Annotation Interface for Rhetorical Structure Theory and Discourse Relations

Summary

Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) annotation has mostly relied on older desktop programs such as RSTTool and the ISI RST Annotation Tool. These are no longer actively developed, can be hard to install across platforms, and require exchanging files with annotators. The paper introduces rstWeb, an RST annotation environment that runs entirely in a web browser. Its server side is a lightweight set of Python scripts over a SQLite database, and the client uses JavaScript. An offline variant runs on localhost via CherryPy. Administrators assign documents, projects, relation schemes and guideline links to users. Each annotator edits a personal copy, so several people can annotate the same text in parallel. The central design choice is that linking, unlinking, span creation and multinuclear grouping are all available directly on each node, with no mode switching. Only EDU segmentation keeps its own view. rstWeb was used to annotate part of the GUM corpus, with error levels comparable to RSTTool and positive user feedback. This makes it easier to build new manually annotated discourse corpora.

Key points

  • Technical stack: Python + SQLite backend with no running services (static form-submit design). The client uses JavaScript with jQuery and jsPlumb. It imports and exports RSTTool's .rs3 format, imports plain text with one EDU per line, and offers undo/redo and step logging.
  • In the GUM corpus (4 genres: travel guides, how-to guides, news, interviews), 29 documents were annotated with rstWeb. They averaged 58.31 EDUs, comparable to the RST Discourse Treebank's 56.59 EDUs on average.
  • Step logs from 10 WSJ documents in RSTDT show about 0.48 mode changes per annotation step and about 0.39 per node. GUM logs show a similar rate of action-type changes (about 0.43 per step), which suggests the mode-free interface saves considerable clicking.
  • Existing data from the RST Discourse Treebank and the German Potsdam Commentary Corpus were imported successfully. With the span and multinuclear buttons disabled, the tool can handle PDTB-style binary relations, though not connective-level annotation.
  • Current limitations: no built-in inter-annotator agreement calculation, no editing of the relation inventory after import, and no support for 'schemas'. These are planned or proposed for future versions.

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

26 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 5 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 10.18653/v1/n16-3001

@inproceedings{zeldes2016rstweb,
  title = {{rstWeb - A Browser-based Annotation Interface for Rhetorical Structure Theory and Discourse Relations}},
  author = {Zeldes, Amir},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Demonstrations},
  year = {2016},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/n16-3001},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/n16-3001}
}

References

12 references, 5 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Lynn Carlson, Daniel Marcu and Mary Ellen Okurowski. 2003. Building a Discourse-Tagged Corpus in the Framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory. In Current and New Directions in Discourse and Dialogue. (Text, Speech and Language Technology 22.) Kluwer, Dordrecht, 85–112. ↗ our card
  2. Kim Gerdes. 2013. Collaborative Dependency Annotation. In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (DepLing 2013). Prague, 88–97. find
  3. Shafiq Joty, Giuseppe Carenini, Raymond Ng, and Yashar Mehdad. 2013. Combining Intra- and Multi-Sentential Rhetorical Parsing for Document-Level Discourse Analysis. In Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Sofia, Bulgaria, 486–496. find
  4. Thomas Krause and Amir Zeldes. 2016. ANNIS3: A New Architecture for Generic Corpus Query and Visualization. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 31(1):118–139. find
  5. William C. Mann and Sandra A. Thompson. 1988. Rhetorical Structure Theory: Toward a Functional Theory of Text Organization. Text 8(3):243–281. ↗ our card
  6. Daniel Marcu, Estibaliz Amorrortu, and Magdalena Romera. 1999. Experiments in Constructing a Corpus of Discourse Trees. In Proceedings of the ACL Workshop Towards Standards and Tools for Discourse Tagging. College Park, MD, 48–57. find
  7. Michael O’Donnell. 2000. RSTTool 2.4 - A Markup Tool for Rhetorical Structure Theory. In Proceedings of the International Natural Language Generation Conference (INLG 2000). Mitzpe Ramon, Israel, 253–256. find our card
  8. Rashmi Prasad, Nikhil Dinesh, Alan Lee, Eleni Miltsakaki, Livio Robaldo, Aravind Joshi, and Bonnie Webber. 2008. The Penn Discourse Treebank 2.0. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2008). Marrakech, Morocco. find our card
  9. Manfred Stede and Arne Neumann. 2014. Potsdam Commentary Corpus 2.0: Annotation for Discourse Research. In Proceedings of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2014). Reykjavik, Iceland, 925–929. find
  10. Mihai Surdeanu, Thomas Hicks, and Marco A. Valenzuela-Escarcega. 2015. Two Practical Rhetorical Structure Theory Parsers. In Proceedings of NAACL-HLT 2015. Denver, CO, 1–5. find our card
  11. Seid Muhie Yimam, Iryna Gurevych, Richard Eckart de Castilho, and Chris Biemann. 2013. WebAnno: A Flexible, Web-based and Visually Supported System for Distributed Annotations. In Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Sofia, Bulgaria, 1–6. find
  12. Amir Zeldes. 2016. The GUM Corpus: Creating Multilayer Resources in the Classroom. Language Resources and Evaluation. Available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10579-016-9343-x. ↗

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