Rhetorical structure theory

Theory of text organization

Rhetorical structure theory (RST) is a theory of text organization that describes relations that hold between parts of text. It was originally developed by William Mann, Sandra Thompson, Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen and others at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute (ISI) and defined in a 1988 paper. The theory was developed as part of studies of computer-based text generation. Natural language researchers later began using RST in text summarization and other applications. It explains coherence by postulating a hierarchical, connected structure of texts. In 2000, Daniel Marcu, also of ISI, demonstrated that practical discourse parsing and text summarization also could be achieved using RST.

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