Andrew Potter


2024

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An Algorithmic Approach to Analyzing Rhetorical Structures
Andrew Potter
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse (CODI 2024)

Although diagrams are fundamental to Rhetorical Structure Theory, their interpretation has received little in-depth exploration. This paper presents an algorithmic approach to accessing the meaning of these diagrams. Three algorithms are presented. The first of these, called reenactment, recreates the abstract process whereby structures are created, following the dynamic of coherence development, starting from simple relational propositions, and combing these to form complex expressions which are in turn integrated to define the comprehensive discourse organization. The second algorithm, called composition, implements Marcu’s strong nuclearity assumption. It uses a simple inference mechanism to demonstrate the reducibility of complex structures to simple relational propositions. The third algorithm, called compress, picks up where Marcu’s assumption leaves off, providing a generalized fully scalable procedure for progressive reduction of relational propositions to their simplest accessible forms. These inferred reductions may then be recycled to produce RST diagrams of abridged texts. The algorithms described here are useful in positioning computational descriptions of rhetorical structures as discursive processes, allowing researchers to go beyond static diagrams and look into their formative and interpretative significance.

2023

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An Algorithm for Pythonizing Rhetorical Structures
Andrew Potter
Proceedings of the 4th Conference on Language, Data and Knowledge

2022

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Inferring Inferences: Relational Propositions for Argument Mining
Andrew Potter
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 2022

2020

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The Rhetorical Structure of Modus Tollens: An Exploration in Logic-Mining
Andrew Potter
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 2020

2019

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The Rhetorical Structure of Attribution
Andrew Potter
Proceedings of the Workshop on Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking 2019

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.
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