Identifying the Linguistic Correlates of Rhetorical Relations

RASTA (Rhetorical Structure Theory Analyzer), a system for automatic discourse analysis, reliably identifies rhetorical relations present in written discourse by examining information available in syntactic and logical form analyses. Since there is a many-to-many relationship between rhetorical relations and elements of linguistic form, RASTA identifies relations by the convergence of a number of pieces of evidence, many of which would be insufficient in isolation to reliably identify a relation.