Rhetorical Structure Theory: A Theory of Text Organization.

Rhetorical Structure Theory is a descriptive theory of a major aspect of the organization of natural text. It is a linguistically useful method for describing natural texts, characterizing their structure primarily in terms of relations that hold between parts of the text. This paper establishes a new definitional foundation for RST. Definitions are made more systematic and explicit, they introduce a new functional element, and incidentally reflect more experience in text analysis. Along with the definitions, the paper examines three claims and findings of RST: the predominance of nucleus/satellite structural patterns, the functional basis of hierarchy, and the communicative role of text structure. (Author) Keywords: Artificial intelligence; Coherence; Computational linguistics; Discourse; Grammar; Knowledge delivery; Natural language processing; Pragmatics. ; Sponsored in part by Grant NSF-IST84-08726.