Rhetorical structure and argumentation structure in monologue text

Abstract

On the basis of a new corpus of short "microtexts" with parallel manual annotations, we study the mapping from discourse structure (in terms of Rhetorical Structure Theory, RST) to argumentation structure. We first perform a qualitative analysis and discuss our findings on correspondence patterns. Then we report on experiments with deriving argumentation structure from the (gold) RST trees, where we compare a tree transformation model, an aligner based on subgraph matching, and a more complex "evidence graph" model.