a new RST website and email discussion list

[Bill Mann of RSTLIST]

              Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST)
                        a new website
                   a new discussion group

     RST is an approach to discovering the linguistic
structures of texts. It is part of the study of what and how
texts communicate.
     RST provides an approach to explaining why texts are
coherent and arbitrary collections of sentences are not
coherent.  It also provides a basis for understanding
certain kinds of implicit communication.
     RST is used in computationally in text generation,
summarization, indexing and text assessment.

     A new website devoted to RST and its neighborhood is
at:

             http://www.sil.org/linguistics/RST

     The website includes an introduction to RST,
bibliographies, a resource for people who are analyzing text,
 published and unpublished analyses of particular texts,
ranging from small texts up to a page in size.  There are
separate bibliographies for linguistic references,
computational linguistic references and RST work by the
creators of RST.

     There is also a new email discussion group for
discussion of RST and how it relates to other linguistic
topics: coherence, implicit communication, pragmatics,
discourse linguistics, semantics and other frameworks for
understanding text.  The group will also discuss
computational uses.
     To sign up to receive the discussions by email and be
eligible to submit comments, send a message to

     LISTSERV at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG

     with

     SUBSCRIBE RSTLIST yourfirstname yourlastname

     in the body of the message.  Use whatever full name
form you want people to see.

     The Address list of RSTlist subscribers will not be
made public.

     The website and list are managed by Bill Mann.  He can be
reached at Bill_Mann at sil.org.