Syntactic Identification of Attribution in the RST Treebank

We present a system that automatically identifies Attribution, an intrasentential relation in the RST Treebank. The system uses uses syntactic information from Penn Treebank parse trees. It identifies Attributions as structures in which a verb takes an SBAR complement, and achieves a f-score of .92. This supports our claim that the Attribution relation should be eliminated from a discourse treebank, since it represents information that is already present in the Penn Treebank, in a different form. More generally, we suggest that intra-sentential relations in the RST Treebank might all be eliminable in this way.