studies of unsignaled relations

[William Mann]

Dear RST List folk:

I am interested in what we know collectively about unsignaled RST relations.  

>From the earliest stages of RST development, it has been clear that in most texts, a large fraction of the relations were not "signaled" by any word, phrase, syntactic configuration or other explicit indication.   Different folks have different expectations about what a general percentage might be.   We should expect that, since we work with texts from different authors and sources.   

The numbers that I have heard have ranged from about 30% unsignaled relations to about 75%.  

For comparison, in the 15 analyses on the RST website, out of 187 relations, 52 are signaled, about 28%.  The remaining 72% are unsignaled.  

What data do you know about?  Are there studies, published or unpublished, that give additional information?

Please reply to me or to the list about what you are aware of, and I will post a summary. 

Many thanks.

Bill Mann


bill_mann at sil.org
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