%0 Conference Proceedings %T Using Rhetorical Structure Theory to Assess Discourse Coherence for Non-native Spontaneous Speech %A Wang, Xinhao %A Gyawali, Binod %A Bruno, James V. %A Molloy, Hillary R. %A Evanini, Keelan %A Zechner, Klaus %Y Zeldes, Amir %Y Das, Debopam %Y Galani, Erick Maziero %Y Antonio, Juliano Desiderato %Y Iruskieta, Mikel %S Proceedings of the Workshop on Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking 2019 %D 2019 %8 June %I Association for Computational Linguistics %C Minneapolis, MN %F wang-etal-2019-using %X This study aims to model the discourse structure of spontaneous spoken responses within the context of an assessment of English speaking proficiency for non-native speakers. Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) has been commonly used in the analysis of discourse organization of written texts; however, limited research has been conducted to date on RST annotation and parsing of spoken language, in particular, non-native spontaneous speech. Due to the fact that the measurement of discourse coherence is typically a key metric in human scoring rubrics for assessments of spoken language, we conducted research to obtain RST annotations on non-native spoken responses from a standardized assessment of academic English proficiency. Subsequently, automatic parsers were trained on these annotations to process non-native spontaneous speech. Finally, a set of features were extracted from automatically generated RST trees to evaluate the discourse structure of non-native spontaneous speech, which were then employed to further improve the validity of an automated speech scoring system. %R 10.18653/v1/W19-2719 %U https://aclanthology.org/W19-2719 %U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/W19-2719 %P 153-162