Rhetorical discourse signals: revisiting RST annotation in the CSTNews corpus

• Roana Rodrigues UFS http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7748-8716
• Jackson Wilke da Cruz Souza UFBA http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1881-6780
• Paula Christina Figueira Cardoso UFLA http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3621-8960

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/stil.2023.234120

Abstract

Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) is a discourse theory in which the coherence of a text can be characterized by a tree structure, where the discourse units are the leaves and the nodes represent the rhetorical relations between them. Although it is known that the identification of connectives that indicate these relations plays an important role in text processing, the absence of a prototypical discourse marker does not eliminate the possibility of their interpretation. In this paper, we describe the analysis of a sample from a corpus already annotated with RST, aiming to identify how these relations are signaled in the discourse. The results highlight the importance of investigating other flags in addition to DMs.

Keywords: Rhetorical Structure Theory, Linguistic description, Linguistic signs, discursive analysis

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