Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Recent Advances in RST and Related Formalisms

Abstract

ii Preface Rhetorical Structure Theory explains text coherence through relations held between parts of text, both in macro and microstructure . RST is both a theory of discourse and a useful tool in various applications. In Linguistics, and as a theory of discourse, RST is a framework for the analysis of texts. It accounts for text coherence by postulating relations among units of discourse, which join together in a recursive fashion. It has provided important insights into text coherence, clause combining and discourse organization in language, across multiple languages. In Computational Linguistics, RST has proven useful in applications such as sentiment analysis and machine translation. A detailed description, including multiple references, is available from the RST web site: http://www.sfu.ca/rst/.The 2017 Workshop on "RST and Related Formalisms" follows a series of events organized biannually first in Brazil (2007Brazil ( , 2009Brazil ( , 2011Brazil ( , 2013 as part of Brazilian NLP conferences, and then in Spain in 2015, as part of the Spanish NLP conference (https://sites.google.com/site/ workshoprst2015/). The workshops have brought together the international community of researchers working in RST.The 2017 Workshop was envisioned as a broader event, drawing program committee members and participants not only from RST, but from the wider field of discourse parsing and coherence relations, in RST and in related theories and approximations (SDRT, PDTB, CCR). We received 11 submissions, and each one was reviewed by two members of the Program Committee, according to the following criteria: originality; adequate theoretical support and methodology; quality of the analysis; clarity of presentation and relevant references. Of the 11 submissions, 10 were accepted. We also expanded the program with a demo session.We would like to thank the members of the Program Committee for their commitment to the workshop. We look forward to another instance of the workshop in the future, and to much more excellent RST-based research. REFERENCE AbstractDeliberation is an increasingly used concept in Argumentation Theory and Linguistic Analysis. But only recently research combined empirical and conceptual tool-boxes from these disciplines for the study of deliberative discourse. The aim of this article is to present a discursive analysis of deliberation as a genre using the relational discourse structure of texts. In particular, we want to see whether different features of deliberation genre map onto relational discourse structures of texts.To do so, authors analyze, in the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), the relational discourse structure of a Basque-Spanish bilingual corpus of argumentative micro-texts written by citizens participating in a series of deliberative mini-publics. Results suggest that genre affects the relational discourse structures of texts and that we could analyze this effect in RST. Finally, we present, to our knowledge, the first annotated corpus-based genre analysis of the relational d...