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<Paper uid="W00-1434">
  <Title>RSTTool 2.4 - A Markup Tool for Rhetorical Structure Theory</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> This paper describes the RSTTool, a graphical interface for marking up the structure of text. While primarily intended to be used for marking up Rhetorical Structure (cf. Rhetorical Structure Thegry (RST): Mann and Thompson (1988)), the tool also allows the mark-up of constituency-style analysis, as in Hasan's Generic Structure Potential (GSP - cf.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Hasan (1996)).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The tool is written in the platform-independent scripting language, Tcl/Tk, and thus works under Windows, Macintosh, UNIX and LINUX operating systems.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> RSTTool is easy to use, one creates an RST diagram from a text by dragging from segment to segment, indicating rhetorical dependency. There is a separate interface for text segmentation. The tool can automatically segment at sentence boundaries (with reasonable accuracy), and the user clicks on the text to add boundaries missed by the automatic segmenter (or click on superfluous boundaries to remove them).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> The tool was previously described in O'Donnell (1997). However, since then tile tool has been substantially revised and extended,(the current version being 2.4). This version is also far more robust due to extensive debugging by one of RST's inventor's, Bill Mann. Particular improvements in the tool in- null clude: 1. GUI for defining relation: ability to add, rename, delete, etc. tile relations used using a graphical user interface.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> 2. St.atistical Analysis: a new interface was added. which allows users to be presented with statistits regarding the proportional use of relations in a text.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> 3. Output Options: the new tool allows saving  of RST analyses in postscript (for inclusion in Latex documents), or sending diagrams directly to the printer. Files are now saved in an XML format, to facilitate importation in other systems. null 4. Improved Structuring: the possibilities for structuring have improved, allowing the insertion of spans, multinuclear elements and schemas within existing structure.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> The Tool consists of four interfaces, which will be described in following sections:  1. Text Segmentation: for marking the boundaries between text segments; 2. Text Structuring: for marking the structural relations between these segments; 3. Relation Editor: for maintaining the set of discourse relations, and schemas; 4. Statistics: for deriving simple descriptive stat null istics based on the analysis.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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