The Rhetorical Structure of Attribution

Andrew Potter


Abstract
The relational status of Attribution in Rhetorical Structure Theory has been a matter of ongoing debate. Although several researchers have weighed in on the topic, and although numerous studies have relied upon attributional structures for their analyses, nothing approaching consensus has emerged. This paper identifies three basic issues that must be resolved to determine the relational status of attributions. These are identified as the Discourse Units Issue, the Nuclearity Issue, and the Relation Identification Issue. These three issues are analyzed from the perspective of classical RST. A finding of this analysis is that the nuclearity and the relational identification of attribution structures are shown to depend on the writer’s intended effect, such that attributional relations cannot be considered as a single relation, but rather as attributional instances of other RST relations.
Anthology ID:
W19-2706
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop on Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking 2019
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, MN
Editors:
Amir Zeldes, Debopam Das, Erick Maziero Galani, Juliano Desiderato Antonio, Mikel Iruskieta
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
38–49
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-2706
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-2706
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Andrew Potter. 2019. The Rhetorical Structure of Attribution. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking 2019, pages 38–49, Minneapolis, MN. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The Rhetorical Structure of Attribution (Potter, NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-2706.pdf
Presentation:
 W19-2706.Presentation.pptx