Rhetorical Structure Theory

1. AKDENİZ UNIVERSITY
ELT MA
DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
RHETORICAL STRUCTURE
THEORY
Sebahat
YILMAZ
20118509716

2. Outline
 Definition of RST
 Why RST
 Several studies used RST
 Areas of Application, Applications
 Principles
 Relations
 Relation Types
 Subject-Matter Relations
 Presentational Relations
 Multinuclear Relations
 Examples
 Other possible Classifications
 Graphical Representations, Schemas
 How to do a RST analysis
 Examples
 Some issues
 Conclusion
 Implications
 References

3. Rhetorical Structure Theory
The term rhetoric is often used to mean
persuasive techniques found in non-
literary texts.

4. Rhetorical Structure Theory
(Mann, Matthiessen, and Thompson ‘89)
“Rhetorical Structure Theory can be
defined as a theory of text
organization that has led to areas of
application ahead of discourse
analysis and text generation”
(Taboada and Mann, 2005)
“A linguistic theory of how text “hangs
together” (Mann & Thompson, 1983).

5. Definition of RST
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.

6. Why RST?
 It defines hierarchic structure in text.
 It describes the relation between text
parts in functional terms, identifying
both the transition point of a relation
and the extent of the items related.
 It provides comprehensive analyses
rather than selective commentary.
 It is insensitive to text size, and has
been applied to a wide variety of sizes
of text.

7. Several studies used RST
 Descriptive RST has been used as an analytical tool
for a wide range of text types. Noel (1986), for
example, shows how it can be used to characterize
news broadcasts.
 Descriptive RST lays a foundation for studies in
contrastive rhetoric. Cui’ s analysis of Mandarin and
English essay (Cui,1985) is an example.
 RST is also useful in analyzing narrative discourse.
Kumpf (1986) is a study of interlanguage of Japanese
and Spanish speakers.
 Finally, it provides a framework for investigating
Relational Prepositions, which are unstated but
inferred prepositions that arise from the text structure
in the process of interpreting texts. Since coherence
depends on these prepositions, RST has been useful
in study of text coherence.

8. Areas of application
 Computational linguistics
 Cross-linguistic studies
 Dialogue and multimedia
 Discourse analysis, argumentation
and writing

9. Applications
 Writing research
◦ How are coherent texts created
◦ RST as a training tool to write effective texts
 Natural Language Generation
◦ Input: communicative goals and semantic representation
◦ Output: text
 Rhetorical/discourse parsing
◦ Rendering of a text in terms of rhetorical relations
◦ Using signals, mostly discourse markers
 Corpus analysis
◦ Annotation of text with discourse relations (Carlson et al. 2002)
◦ Application to spoken language (Taboada 2004, and references in Taboada and Mann 2006)
 Relationship to other discourse phenomena
◦ Between nuclei and co-reference
 For more applications :
◦ Taboada, Maite and William C. Mann. (2006). Applications of Rhetorical Structure Theory. Discourse
Studies, 8 (4), 567-588.

10. Principles
• Coherent texts consist of minimal units,
which are linked to each other through
rhetorical relations.
- Rhetorical relations also known, in other
theories, as coherence or discourse
relations.
• There must be some relation holding
among the different parts of the text.

11. Relations
• Most of the relations have two parts:
• a nucleus and a set of one or more
satellites.
• Some spans are more central to the text’s
purpose (nuclei), whereas others are
secondary (satellites).
• The nucleus is necessary but any
satellites are optional.
• Spans are joined into discourse relations.
• Spans that are in a discourse relation may
enter into new relations.

12. Relation Types
• Mann and Thompson propose a
set of over 20 relations.
• They distinguish subject matter
relations (informational) and
presentational relations
(intentional) , a division roughly
corresponds to the semantic-
pragmatic dichotomy.
• There are Multinuclear Relations,
as well. If there are nuclei more than
one, the relationship is called

13. Relation Types
Subject matter relations Presentational relations
 Condition Motivation
 Circumstance Background
 Solutionhood Antihesis
 Volitional Cause Evidence
 Volitional Result Enablement
 Non-volitional cause Concession
 Non-volitional Result Justification
 Purpose
 Otherwise
 Interpretation
 Evaluation
 Restatement
 Summary
 Sequence
 Elaboration
 Contrast


14. Multinuclear Relations
There are also multi-nuclear relations:
 Contrast
 Joint
 List
 Multinuclear restatement
 Sequence
 Conjunction
 Disjunction

15. Relation Types
Subject Matter Relations
Those whose intended effect is that the
hearer
recognize the relation in question.
They relate the content of the text spans.

16. Circumstance
It holds between two parts of a text if
one of the parts establishes a
circumstance or situation, and the
other part is interpreted within or
relative that circumstance or situation.
“Probably the most extreme case of
Visitors Fever I have ever witnessed
was a few summers ago, when I
visited relatives in the Midwest.”

17. Example: Circumstance
“[N] Probably the most extreme case of
Visitors Fever I have ever witnessed was
a few summers ago,
[S] when I visited relatives in the
Midwest.”
 The satellite in a Circumstance relation
sets a framework, e.g., a temporal or
spatial framework, within which to
interpret the nucleus. This function has
been grammaticized in English in the
form of circumstantial hypotactic clauses
(M&T 1987:48)

18. Elaboration
(Set-member,class/instance/whole-
part…)
N: basic information
S: additional information
John likes coffee. He drinks it every day.

19. Example: Elaboration
[Your teacher may tell you lots of ways to
keep your eyes from nearsightedness.]
[Such as keep thirty centimeters from
your eyes to the table,]
[and not to read books when it’s dark.]
 The second and third clauses are linked
through the relationship of ‘joint’ because
one is added to the other and jointly
modify the first sentence by elaborating
its meaning (‘elaboration’).

20. Contrast
Multinuclear
S: one alternate
Other Span: the other alternate.
John likes coffee. Mary hates it.

21. Explanation
John went to the coffee shop. He was
sleepy.

22. Discourse structure
John likes coffee
He drinks it every day
Mary hates coffee.
They argue a lot

23. Sequence
Multinuclear
Peel oranges, and slice crosswise.
• Across sentences:
1. Peel oranges, 2. and slice crosswise. 3. Arrange in a bowl 4.
and sprinkle with rum and coconut. 5. Chill until ready to
serve

24. Volitional Cause
 (a) George Bush supports big business.
 (b) He’s sure to veto House Bill 1711.

25. Nonvolutional Cause
“Remember all those vegetables you slipped under
the table?
Maybe that’s why sparky lived so long.”

26. Subject Matter Relations
 Solutionhood: N is a situation or method
supporting full or partial satisfaction of the
need. S is a question, request, problem,
or other expressed need
 Purpose: S presents goal of the activity
in N
 Nonvolitional-result: N: a situation; S:
another situation which is caused by that
one, but not by anyone’s deliberate action
 Condition : S presents precondition for
N

27. Example

28. Presentational Relations
Those whose intended effect is to
increase some inclination in the hearer;
such as the desire to act or the degree of
positive regard for, belief in, or acceptance
of the nucleus.
More rhetorical in nature. They are meant
to achieve some effect on the reader.

29. Presentational Relations
 Motivation (increases desire)
 Background (increases ability)
 Antithesis (increases positive
regard)
 Evidence (increases belief)
 Enablement (increases ability)
 Concession (increases positive
regard)
 Justification (increases

30. Motivation
(Mann & Thompson, 1993)
Relation name: Motivation
• Constraints on N:
Presents an action (unrealized with respect to N) in which
the
hearer is the actor.
• Constraints on S: None
• Constraints on S+N
Comprehending S increases the hearers desire to perform
the
action presented in N.
• Effect:
The hearer’s desire to perform the action presented in N i

31. Motivation
Motivation relates any utterance which
expresses the speaker’s desire that
the hearer performs some action (the
nucleus) with material which will justify
the requested action(the satellites).
1) Come to the party for the new
president.
2) There will be lots of good food.
• A motivation relation exists between 1
and 2

32. Motivation
S: (a) Come home by 5:00. (b) Then we
can go to the hardware store before it
closes. (c) That way we can finish the
bookshelves tonight.
(a)
(a) (b) (c)
(b) (c)
motivation motivation
condition
condition

33. Background
N: text whose understanding is being
facilitated
S:text for facilitating understanding

34. Concession

35. Evidence
N: claim.
S provides evidence for something claimed in N.
They know, therefore, that one of the ten people on
the island was not a murderer in any sense of the
word, and it follows, paradoxically, that that person
must logically be the murderer. (Christie 2003:315)
 The first unit (They know, therefore… any sense of the
word) is related to the second unit (and it follows… be the
murderer) by means of an ‘evidence’ tie between the first
unit and second unit.
 That is to say, the first unit functions as the evidence fo
the second unit. The relations, units and direction of effect
are all decided by the analyst (Bateman and Delin
2006:590).

36. Example: Evidence
 Constraints on the Nucleus
◦ The reader may not believe N to a degree
satisfactory to the writer
 Constraints on the Satellite
◦ The reader believes S or will find it
credible
 Constraints on the combination of N+S
◦ The reader’s comprehending S increases
their belief of N
 Effect (the intention of the writer)
◦ The reader’s belief of N is increased

37. Antithesis
 N: ideas favored by the author
S: ideas disfavored by the author

38. Example: Antithesis
 Nucleus (spans 2-3) made up
of two spans in an Antithesis
relation
 Concession across sentences

39. Example
multinuclear
relation

40. Example

41.  So long as Conditional
 To Purpose
• What is more Elaboration
 The text is constructed on a thesis-
antithesis relation; first 9 units are
thesis, the rest is antithesis.

42. Other possible classifications
 Relations that hold outside the text
◦ Condition, Cause, Result
vs. those that are only internal to the text
◦ Summary, Elaboration
 Relations frequently marked by a discourse marker
◦ Concession (although, however); Condition (if, in case)
vs. relations that are rarely, or never, marked
◦ Background, Restatement, Interpretation
 Preferred order of spans: nucleus before satellite
◦ Elaboration – usually first the nucleus (material being elaborated on) and
then satellite (extra information)
vs. satellite-nucleus
◦ Concession – usually the satellite (the although-type clause or span)
before the nucleus

43. Other classifications are possible, and longer and
shorter lists have been proposed
Relation names (M&T 1988)
Circumstance Antithesis and Concession
Solutionhood Antithesis
Elaboration Concession
Background Condition and Otherwise
Enablement and Motivation Condition
Enablement Otherwise
Motivation Interpretation and Evaluation
Evidence and Justify Interpretation
Evidence Evaluation
Justify Restatement and Summary
Relations of Cause Restatement
Volitional Cause Summary
Non-Volitional Cause Other Relations
Volitional Result Sequence
Non-Volitional Result Contrast
Purpose

44. Relation Name Nucleus Satellite
Antithesis ideas favored by the author ideas disfavored by the author
Background text whose understanding is being facilitated text for facilitating understanding
Circumstance
text expressing the events or ideas occurring in the
interpretive context
an interpretive context of situationor time
Concession situation affirmed by author situation which is apparently inconsistent but also affirmed by author
Condition
actionor situationwhose occurrence resultsfrom the
occurrence of the conditioning situation
conditioning situation
Elaboration basic information additional information
Enablement an action information intended to aid the reader in performing an action
Evaluation a situation an evaluative comment about the situation
Evidence a claim information intended to increase the readerÕ
s belief in the claim
Interpre
tation a situation an interpretation of the situation
Justify text information supporting the writerÕsright toexpress the text
Motivation an action information intended to increase the readerÕ
s desire toperform the action
Non-volitional Cause a situation anothersituationwhich causes that one, but not by anyoneÕ
s deliberate action
Non-volitional Result a situation anothersituationwhich is caused by that one, but not by anyoneÕsdeliberate action
Otherwise (anti
conditional)
actionor situationwhose occurrence resultsfrom the
lack of occurrence of theconditioning situation
conditioning situation
Purpose an intended situation theintent behind the situation
Restatement a situation a reexpression of thesituation
Solutionhood a situation or method supportingfull or partial
satisfactionof the need
a question, request, problem, or other expressed need
Summary text a short summary of that text
Volitional Cause a situation anothersituationwhich causes that one, by someoneÕsdeliberate action
Volitional Result a situation anothersituationwhich is caused by that one, by someoneÕs deli
berate action
More RST relations

45. Graphical representation
 A horizontal line
covers a span of text (possibly
made up of further spans
 A vertical line
signals the nucleus or nuclei
 A curve
represents a relation,
and the direction of
the arrow, the direction
of satellite towards
nucleus .

46. Schemas
motivation enablement sequence sequence
circumstance contrast
joint
• They specify how spans of text can co-
occur, determining possible RST text
structures

47. How to do a RST analysis
RST provides a systematic way for an analyst to
annotate a text.
1. Divide the text into units
• Unit size may vary, depending on the goals of the
analysis
• Typically, units are clauses (but not complement
clauses)
2. Examine each unit, and its neighbours. Is there a clear
relation holding between them?
3. If yes, then mark that relation (e.g., Condition)
4. If not, the unit might be at the boundary of a higher-
level relation. Look at relations holding between larger
units (spans)
5. Continue until all the units in the text are accounted for
6. Remember, marking a relation involves satisfying all 4
fields (especially the Effect). The Effect is the plausible
intention that the text creator had.

48. Example
 An analysis is usually built by reading the text and
constructing a diagram that resembles Figure 1.
This is a title and summary, appearing at the top of
an article in Scientific American magazine
(Ramachandran and Anstis, 1986). The original
text, broken into numbered units, is:
1. [Title:] The Perception of Apparent Motion
2. [Abstract:] When the motion of an intermittently
seen object is ambiguous,
3. the visual system resolves confusion
4. by applying some tricks that reflect a built-in
knowledge of properties of the physical world.
 The main way in which one unit becomes
connected to another is by adding an RST relation
to the diagram

49. FIGURE 1. Diagram of an RST analysis

50. Example
1) Lactose and Lactase
2) Lactose is milk sugar; 3) the enzyme
lactase breaks it down.
4) For want of lactase most adults
cannot digest milk.
5) In populations that drink milk the
adults have more lactase, perhaps
through natural selection.
6) Norman Kretchmer, Scientific
American, page 70, October 1972.

51. The text:
1) Lactose and Lactase
2) Lactose is milk sugar; 3) the enzyme lactase breaks it down.
4) For want of lactase most adults cannot digest milk.
5) In populations that drink milk the adults have more lactase, perhaps through natural
selection.
6) Norman Kretchmer, Scientific American, page 70, October 1972.
(http://www.sfu.ca/rst)

52. Some issues
 Problems in identifying relations
◦ Judgments are plausibility judgments. Two analysts might
differ in their analyses
 Definitions of units
◦ Vary from researcher to researcher, depending on the level
of granularity needed
 Relations inventory
◦ Many available
◦ Each researcher tends to create their own, but large ones
tend to be unmanageable
 A theory purely of intentions
◦ In contrast with Grosz and Sidner’s (1986), it does not
relate structure of discourse to attentional state. On the
other hand, it provides a much richer set of relations.

53. Some Problems with RST
(Moore & Pollack 1992)
 How many Rhetorical Relations are
there?
 How can we use RST in dialogue as
well as monologue?
 RST does not allow for multiple
relations holding between parts of a
discourse
 RST does not model overall structure
of the discourse

54. Conclusion
The last twenty years or so of
development and use of RST provide us
with three types of contributions:
 a better understanding of text,
 a conceptual structure of relations and
how it relates to coherence, and
 contribution to a great diversity of work in
several fields in which RST is used as a
conceptual starting point, far beyond text
generation, the initial target (Taboada
and Mann, 2005).

55. Implications
RST may be used to
 provide a general way to describe the
relations among clauses in a text,
whether or not they are grammatically
or lexically signalled;
 describe or understand the structure
of texts, and to link rhetorical structure
to other phenomena, such as
anaphora or cohesion, and
 analyze narrative discourse.

56. References
 Alexander,,M., 2009). Rhetorıcal Structure And Reader Manıpulatıon In Agatha Chrıstıe’s Murder
On The Orıent Express. (Miscelánea: a journal of english and american studies 39 , 13-27.
 Carlson, Lynn, Daniel Marcu and Mary Ellen Okurowski. (2002). RST Discourse Treebank,
LDC2002T07 [Corpus]. Philadelphia, PA: Linguistic Data Consortium.
 Grosz, Barbara J. and Candace L. Sidner. (1986). Attention, intentions, and the structure of
discourse. Computational Linguistics, 12 (3), 175-204.
 Gruber H. and Huemer B., (2008). Two Views on Text Structure: Using Rhetorical Structure
Theory and Register & Genre Theory in Improving Students’ Academic Writing. Systemic
Functional Linguistics in Use. Odense Working Papers in Language and Communication vol. 29
 Mann, William C., Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen and Sandra A. Thompson. (1992). Rhetorical
Structure Theory and text analysis. In W. C. Mann and S. A. Thompson (Eds.), Discourse
Description: Diverse Linguistic Analyses of a Fund- Raising Text (pp. 39-78). Amsterdam and
Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
 Mann, William C. and Maite Taboada. (2007). RST Web Site. Retrieved July 2008, from
http://www.sfu.ca/rst
 Mann, William C. and Sandra A. Thompson. (1988). Rhetorical Structure Theory: Toward a
functional theory of text organization. Text, 8 (3), 243-281.
 Mann, W. C. & Thompson, S. A. 1987. Rhetorical Structure Theory: a Theory of Text Organisation.
ISI Reprint Series ISI/RS–87–190. Marina del Rey (CA): Information Sciences Institute.
 Skoufaki, S., (2009) An Exploratory Application of Rhetorical Structure Theory to Detect
Coherence Errors in L2 English Writing: Possible Implications for Automated WritingEvaluation
Software. Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language Processing Vol. 14, No. 2, 181-204
 Taboada, Maite. (2004). Building Coherence and Cohesion: Task-Oriented Dialogue in English and
Spanish. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
 Taboada, Maite and William C. Mann. (2006a). Applications of Rhetorical Structure Theory.
Discourse Studies, 8 (4), 567-588.
• Taboada, Maite and William C. Mann. (2006). Rhetorical Structure Theory: Looking back and
moving ahead. Discourse Studies, 8 (3), 423-459.
• Yeh C.C. (2004). The Relationship of Cohesion and Coherence: A Contrastive Study of English

57. Thank You
