Rhetorical Structure of Business English

[Maite Taboada]

Hi Jelisaveta,

I don't know if you have received any private replies to your question (if 
so, could you post a summary?). Here are some ideas.

The corpus built by Marcu and colleagues would be a very useful resource. 
It contains Wall Street Journal articles, annotated with RST relations. The 
corpus is available for purchase (USD $100) from the Linguistic Data 
Consortium:

http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2002T07

A number of publications describe the annotation process. Although you may 
be more interested in the analysis of the texts themselves, the 
publications provide some insights into the types of RST relations found. 
Most of them are available from Daniel Marcu's page: 
http://www.isi.edu/~marcu/  Also, most ACL-related publications can be 
found in the ACL Anthology: http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/
    Carlson, Lynn and Daniel Marcu (2001) Discourse Tagging Manual. 
Unpublished manuscript, 
http://www.isi.edu/~marcu/discourse/tagging-ref-manual.pdf.
    Carlson, Lynn, Daniel Marcu and Mary Ellen Okurowski (2003) Building a 
discourse tagged corpus in the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory. In 
J. van Kuppevelt and R. Smith (Eds.), Current and New Directions in 
Discourse and Dialogue (pp. 85-112). Berlin: Springer.
    Marcu, Daniel, Magdalena Romera and Estibaliz Amorrortu (1999) 
Experiments in constructing a corpus of discourse trees, Proceedings of ACL 
Workshop on Standards and Tools for Discourse Tagging (pp. 48-57). College 
Park, Maryland.
    Soricut, Radu and Daniel Marcu (2003) Sentence level discourse parsing 
using syntactic and lexical information, Proceedings of Human Language 
Technology and North American Association for Computational Linguistics 
Conference (HLT-NAACL'03). Edmonton, Canada.

There is also work on annotating Wall Street Journal articles using a 
different approach:
    Wolf, Florian and Edward Gibson (2005) Representing discourse 
coherence: A corpus-based analysis. Computational Linguistics, 31 (2): 249-287.

I found a reference to business genres and RST in my bibliography. It's 
business letters, not articles, but just in case:
    Kong, Kenneth C. C. (1998) Are simple business request letters really 
simple? A comparison of Chinese and English business request letters. Text, 
18 (1): 103-141.

Finally, I've done an analysis of the use of discourse markers in a subset 
of the RST corpus:
    Taboada, Maite (2006) Discourse markers as signals (or not) of 
rhetorical relations. Journal of Pragmatics, 38 (4): 567-592.

You can also consult the RST bibliographies on the RST web site: 
http://www.sfu.ca/rst/05bibliographies/index.html

Hope that helps,

- Maite




At 17:22 17/07/2006 +0200, Jelisaveta Safranj wrote:
>Dear RST list,
>
>I am working on a PhD project on "Rhetorical Structure of Business 
>English" ( based on a corpus of online articles from The Financial Times 
>). I wonder if anyone is aware of other studies using RST in business 
>English newspaper articles?
>
>I'd be very grateful if you could send me some references if you know of 
>research that might be related to mine, So far I am aware of general 
>papers on the subject of discourse segmentation (Mann and Thompson, Grosz 
>and Sidner, Moore and Pollack ); but wonder if there are papers dealing 
>with the business genre specifically.
>
>Thanks for any advice.
>
>Jelisaveta
>
>Jelisaveta Safranj, MA
>Senior lecturer in English language
>Faculty of Technical Sciences
>Trg Dositeja Obradovica 6
>University of Novi Sad
>Novi Sad, Serbia
>
>e-mail: savetas at uns.ns.ac.yu

_____
Maite Taboada
Assistant Professor
Department of Linguistics
Simon Fraser University
8888 University Dr.
Burnaby, B.C. V5A 1S6
Canada

Tel: 604-291-5585  Fax: 604-291-5659
mtaboada at sfu.ca - http://www.sfu.ca/~mtaboada
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