In Defense Of Syntax: Informational, Intentional, And Rhetorical Structures In Discourse

Much has been written on the nature and use of so-called rhetorical relations to govern the structure anti coherence of discourse, and much has been written on the need for communicative intentions to govern discourse construction. In early research on automated text creation, the operationalized structural relations from Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) [Mann & Thompson 88] were used both to carry the speaker's communicative intention (which enabled the use of a NOAH-like top-down expansion planner) and also to ensure coherence (by utilizing the constraints on Nucleus and Satellite from RST). This dual functionality is characteristic of the operators used in the various text structure planners that have been built to date, whether they were oriented more toward surface text structure (such as the relation/plans of the RST Structurer [Hovy 88, Itovy 90]) or more toward the communicative intentions underlying the text (as the text plans of the EES and PEA text planner in the later [Moore & Paris 89, Moore 89] work) 1.