I present rst-workbench, a software package that simplifies the installation and usage of numerous end-to-end Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) parsers. The tool offers a web-based interface that allows users to enter text and let multiple RST parsers generate analyses concurrently. The resulting RST trees can be compared visually, manually post-edited (in the browser) and stored for later usage.

We present a revised and extended version of the Potsdam Commentary Corpus, a collection of 175 German newspaper commentaries (op-ed pieces) that has been annotated with syntax trees and three layers of discourse-level information: nominal coreference,connectives and their arguments (similar to the PDTB, Prasad et al. 2008), and trees reflecting discourse structure according to Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann/Thompson 1988). Connectives have been annotated with the help of a semi-automatic tool, Conano (Stede/Heintze 2004), which identifies most connectives and suggests arguments based on their syntactic category. The other layers have been created manually with dedicated annotation tools. The corpus is made available on the one hand as a set of original XML files produced with the annotation tools, based on identical tokenization. On the other hand, it is distributed together with the open-source linguistic database ANNIS3 (Chiarcos et al. 2008; Zeldes et al. 2009), which provides multi-layer search functionality and layer-specific visualization modules. This allows for comfortable qualitative evaluation of the correlations between annotation layers.