What Does Rst Stand for Writing What Does Rst Stand for in Langaguge Arts
By Bill Isle of mann, March 2000
This page is slightly out of date, mostly considering some of these topics accept been taken upward, and other applications be.
There are numerous open up questions involving RST. This page is designed to give you a experience for this diversity of problems, and in particular to help students who are in the procedure of selecting thesis or dissertation topics, and researchers who want to study in the neighborhood of RST. For each one:
one. I do not know of any full scale exploration of the subject in the literature, and
ii. I believe that it could be a genuine contribution to the art to do such an exploration, and
3. I do not know of any substantial sized effort that is ongoing and partly completed on the topic (simply at that place could be some.) In a few cases, there has been piece of work that needs to be repeated, validated and perhaps extended.
I am non trying to identify thesis/dissertation-sized bug; that is a thing for the teaching department. In some cases, ane question would take several theses to explore well. In other cases, several related questions might be gathered to help ascertain one thesis topic.
Also, I am non attempting to accommodate ancient academic boundaries. Nosotros should feel free to integrate cognition from a range of disciplines. Certainly psychology, philosophy, linguistics, sociology, estimator scientific discipline and some other disciplines all acquit on the problems below.
Groups of open issues:
What actually happens in texts?
It is piece of cake, and also risky, to presume most what surely happens in text. Many of the facts about the text that exhibits particular RST structure are unknown or nigh so. Some of our "full general" knowledge has been derived simply from texts in a single language, only from a small sample of texts, and but from unsystematic sampling. For many of these topics it is non necessary to do a large sample study in order to make progress; suggestive empirical results are easy to create, and are worthwhile for guiding studies of the very few things that need large-sample studies.
This sort of investigation is advisable in this topic area because the basic phenomena are only partly identified.
• What are the different patterns actually plant in how relations are realized in text? What are their frequencies?
• What are the conditions under which each relation is signalled or not?
• Under what atmospheric condition are Relational Propositions (RPs) defeasible or not? [Relational Propositions are implicitly communicated by soapbox structure. For a brusque summary of the meaning and status of Relational Propositions, see an archived message by Bill Mann to the RSTlist on February 29, 2000. Click here to become the archive folio: athenaeum ]
• How does recognition of the relations of RST collaborate with the cohesive devices of various languages?
• What sorts of RPs arise from texts?
• RPs have been explored a bit for nucleated relations, but much less for multinuclear ones. What RPs arise from multinuclear relations?
There are problems of what sorts of differences between languages, writing traditions, social classes, educational backgrounds and expressive training would require adjustments in the RST required to analyze the text that various people produce. The notion of coherence seems quite widely shared, but how do the details differ beyond society, or amid the people who act as RST observers? For the latter:
• How consistent are individual observers doing RST analysis? To what degree do very similar observers tend to agree? How are these related to observer training or experience?
• Does RST work on texts that are focused on reasoning or argumentation, e.k. from mathematics, astronomy or law?
• Comparing oral and written monologues, practice the RST patterns or signaling patterns differ?
• What patterns are in that location in the ordering of spans in RST analyses?
• How have the set of RST relations and their realization patterns varied along with centuries of linguistic communication modify?
Understanding RST analysis
There are merely a few studies of how observers office when they analyze text. How does subjectivity appear in the resulting analyses?
Prevailing stance, especially post-obit studies by Marcu, suggests that rigid left-to-right analysis methods fail. The same is said of summit downwardly, right to left and lesser upwardly analysis methods. Constructive analysis seems to be all-time when information technology is opportunistic, non algorithmically guided. Yet we presume that reading proceeds left to right in some sense, and that the observer's access to text is very much like the reader's. This paradox could be resolved if it were demonstrated that readers motion around in texts in a manner that resembles practiced opportunistic analysis. It is a speculation, maybe easily dismissed using the technical literature on reading.
RST and Other Linguistic Domains
The dominant viewpoint in the definitions of RST is that it is a manner to gather detailed information about text in a systematic fashion. This contrasts, for example with RST being an abstract model of some part of the text understanding process.
As an orientation and training for building theories or models, RST can contribute in interesting ways but information technology cannot exist validated except every bit a minor fragment of a larger whole. It requires compatible "modules" or subtheories or submodels to collaborate with. Problems arise virtually how RST and others interact.
• What on the others does RST create, and what constraints or demands does information technology place on the interacting models? (For example, several RST relations including Evidence are formulated in terms of degrees of conventionalities. This may create a requirement that a semantic model exist able to somehow represent degrees of belief.)
Asking about these others, every bit a research planning do, involves identifying other parts of linguistics that one is willing to (temporarily) take for granted equally beingness "adept enough for our current purposes." Each such footstep is therefore controversial, because even the most widely acknowledged stable points in linguistics are being questioned.
Hither we can telephone call the Neighboring Linguistic Model NLM, and we can ask some underspecified questions:
• What data does RST require for which NLM is the obvious source?
• What can RST supply to NLM that will help NLM role effectively?
• Are the frameworks of assumptions of RST and NLM entirely compatible?
Among the wide range of possible NLMs, these generic areas (as examples of singled-out NLMs) seem to be particularly open up to fruitful interaction:
• Semantics.
• Speech human action theories.
• RST and relational propositions in interaction with proposition-like entities of syntax: dependent clauses, adjective modifiers, etc.
• The reader's knowledge of the writer, based on the text, its context of appearance and shared cultural expectations about the author.
And so, taking semantics equally an exemplar, we can ask:
• Can methods that explain the recognition of unsignalled relations exist reconciled with traditional semantic methods?
• Can methods that explain the finding of Relational Propositions be reconciled with traditional semantic methods.
Across Relational Structure of Written Monologues
• What aspects of dialogue or multiparty interaction are not represented past RST? For these, how can RST exist extended and modified to let representation of the coherence and intentional structure of entire interactions?
• Current representations of then-called Holistic Structure in RST lack detail. How practice the ii varieties of construction combine to perform larger-scale text functions?
How RST Discourse Construction Arises and How it is Recognized
We have RST as it is presently defined to be a method for structured clarification rather than a model of how language is used. RST allows united states of america to discover with greater precision and certainty than nosotros get from just reading text. So two very large questions arise:
• How do these regularities that nosotros see using RST reflect how text is read (or how language is understood)?
• How do these regularities that we see using RST reflect how text is created (or how linguistic communication is produced)?
Answers to these questions would be models of linguistic communication apply, including both information structures (or memories) and processes, embedded in some broader view of the language user.
Progress in this area will be incremental and fragmentary for the foreseeable future. Information technology is certainly open for indefinitely many theses.
Revising RST Analysis: Telescopic
There are numerous ideas about what RST -- for no obvious reason -- fails to represent. In that location is a possibility that by increasing the conceptual telescopic of RST, much more informative text descriptions could be created by observers.
First, notice that RST does not contain whatever unary operators. It is dominated at the relational level by binary (ii-argument) operations, and at the schema level (encounter Thou&T 88) by northward-ary operations, forth with restrictions on mixing relations to particular nuclei. One cluster of ideas suggests adding unary operators in the analysis outcome forms. These operators could include: quotation, hedging, incertitude, focus, indirectness of spoken language acts, distancing of the writer from certain kinds of responsibilities, and other possibilities. Unary operators (UOs) could exist added every bit a group or i past 1. Each would enhance the result of how that UO can exist defined independent of form, and whether it carries any compatibility constraints relative to other structures.
Another cluster of possibilities concerns analysis grade. RST analyses, similar the diagrams in diverse styles of grammer, tend strongly toward unmarried tree structures for texts. Other comparable varieties of analysis, such as Systemic Functional Grammar, apply multiple coextensive structures, each of which covers the entirety. One result is that the individual structures can be much simpler, since the trouble of coordinating several varieties of noesis has been dismissed. Information technology has been suggested that RST be reformulated to show Systemic-like varieties of structure, which (done in an orthodox mode) might be called Ideational, Interpersonal and Textual. Amid other things, this might brand it possible to detect a Textual component of structure that would chronicle directly to ideas of presentational style and genre. It is worth much more exploration than information technology has been given. Revising RST Assay: Process RST takes a distinctive approach to subjectivity in assay, both restricting information technology and making its role explicit. The consequences of doing so have never been systematically explored. Besides, the possibility of using this arroyo to subjectivity exterior of RST has not been advisedly considered.
Conceptual Foundations
Non-Binary Concepts: RST is formulated using various non-binary concepts, notions that can be fulfilled to varying degrees. These include, in the reader, belief, desire to act, degree of difference (e.grand. in Contrast), conceptual compatibility (eastward.g. in Concession), social right to express (e.1000. in Justify), and adequacy of the reader's prior knowledge (e.g. in Background.). They as well include (in the observer) plausibility (both singular and comparative plausibility.)
These definitional choices give RST broad representational power in assay, but they also severely restrict how RST ideas can be reconciled with more traditional binary ideas in closely related disciplines, such as semantics based on logic and fix theory.
These choices should exist reexamined advisedly. It would as well exist worthwhile to reconsider the whole notion of "Relational Propositions," for which the almost available interpretation is binary.
Intention: RST makes explicit employ of the notion of the author's intention, and attributes an intention (the "effect") to every use of every relation. This is broad but very shallow. Preliminary work on developing RST used the concept of intention much more extensively. Of course, it is extremely controversial in some academic circles to do so. (See, for example, Intentions in the Experience of Pregnant , Raymond W. Gibbs Jr., Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 3-xviii.) RST places few restrictions on what intentions may ascend or combine. (For example, one might doubtable that the intentions associated with low subtrees might be restricted to those that somehow serve the higher intentions of the text. But there are notational and formulation issues, and beyond those it is an unstudied empirical issue whether texts are in fact consistent in that fashion.) Problems of how RST can exist elaborated, and also made more than definite and informative in analysis of writer's intention, need to be studied at length.
Scientific Status: Very little piece of work has been done on the scientific status of RST, and of that work most aught appears in the literature. Especially because of the distinctive handling of subjectivity and the issues of the contrast of descriptions of phenomena with explanations of those phenomena, more work would exist worthwhile.
Advice: In 20th century physics, there emerged a "standard model" of physical interactions, a consensus against which new ideas were measured. Linguistics has no consensus and no "standard model of symbolic communication" against which ideas about communication might be measured. The convenient and most widely used model, the so called "code model," is also widely rejected. RST also says very little virtually communication, partly for lack of an accustomed culling to the code model. Ideas and empirical studies that would relate RST to definite notions of communication could become very valuable.
Applications of RST
A small number of people take used RST every bit a writing guide . All such apply has been entirely informal, but there is the possibility of developing a practical aid to writing based on RST. Closely related, nosotros could think of RST as a potential basis for conceptual preparation of students or teachers of writing.
At that place are a number of computational systems that apply or are inspired past RST. The applications include:
• text generation,
• automated summarization,
• text indexing,
• evaluation of students' compositions
• (there are more.)
Many of these prove promise, but some are not gear up for general use. Extension or reformulation of existing approaches appears worthwhile.
Beyond these, there are ideas that seem outgoing but which have no literature. Here are examples:
• Discourse-aware Controlled languages for translation: At that place is presently a collection of proprietary and public technologies for automatic translation of documents into multiple languages, with the difficulties of translation strongly limited by controlled vocabularies and imposing stiff limitations on how words and syntax are used. To my knowledge, the restrictions in these methods are bars to the judgement level. Based on RST, the methods could be extended to whole texts, to unambiguous meaning and scope
• Preanalyzed text: Assume that text, written by humans, can exist entered into computers fastened to underlying RST diagrams or their equivalent, representing the writers' depression level intentions. So several kinds of support for the writers tin can be considered:
Regularization of text organization.
Exhibiting implicit RPs.
Selective prompting for reader back up (background, summaries, restatements, ...).
Automatic topical outlining.
Regularization of tense, irrealis and other features across multinuclear sets.
Assisted reordering.
As computational research information technology might be worth trying.
go to top©2005-2021 William C. Mann, Maite Taboada. All rights reserved.
Source: https://www.sfu.ca/rst/03research/index.html
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