@inproceedings{potter-2025-breaking,
    title = "Breaking Ties: Some Methods for Refactoring {RST} Convergences",
    author = "Potter, Andrew",
    editor = "Alam, Mehwish  and
      Tchechmedjiev, Andon  and
      Gracia, Jorge  and
      Gromann, Dagmar  and
      di Buono, Maria Pia  and
      Monti, Johanna  and
      Ionov, Maxim",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Language, Data and Knowledge",
    month = sep,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Naples, Italy",
    publisher = "Unior Press",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ldl-25-ingestion/2025.ldk-1.24/",
    pages = "233--242",
    ISBN = "978-88-6719-333-2",
    abstract = "62 Among the set of schemata specified by Rhetorical Structure Theory is a pattern known variously as the request schema, satellite tie, multisatellite nucleus, or convergence. The essential feature of this schema is that it permits multiple satellites to attach to a single nucleus. Although the schema has long been considered fundamental to RST, it has never been subjected to detailed evaluation. This paper provides such an assessment. Close examination shows that it results in structures that are ambiguous, disjoint, incomplete, and sometimes incoherent. Fortunately, however, further examination shows it to be unnecessary. This paper describes the difficulties with convergences and presents methods for refactoring them as explicit specifications of text structure. The study shows that convergences can be more clearly rendered not as flat relational conjunctions, but rather as organized expressions of cumulative rhetorical moves, wherein each move asserts an identifiable structural integrity and the expressions conform to specifiable scoping rules."
}