Rhetorical structure theory

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.

[3] In 2000, Daniel Marcu, also of ISI, demonstrated that practical discourse parsing and text summarization also could be achieved using RST.

RST using rhetorical relations provide a systematic way for an analyst to analyse the text.

The following example is a title and summary, appearing at the top of an article in Scientific American magazine (Ramachandran and Anstis, 1986).

Computer scientists Ana Cristina Bicharra Garcia and Clarisse Sieckenius de Souz have used RST as the basis of a design rationale system called ADD+.