Taxonomy of Discourse Signals for RST Relations: A Study in a News Corpus

Taxonomia de sinalizadores discursivos de relações RST: um estudo em um corpus jornalístico

We have observed that the relationship between two or more textual propositions is not always signaled by prepositions or conjunctions, commonly referred to as Discourse Markers (DMs). Recent studies in English, grounded in the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), have compiled a list of linguistic and structural cues that facilitate the manual and automatic identification of coherence relations. However, there is a scarcity of similar research for the Portuguese language. Through an analysis of the CSTNews corpus, we identified discourse signals (DSs) of RST relations that go beyond DMs. In this study, we propose a classification of these DSs into five categories: graphical, syntactic, morphological, and discourse markers, and we describe the occurrence of each category according to the identified relationships.

Keywords:
Discourse signals; Rhetorical Structure Theory; Coherence relations