Probability Distribution of Discourse Relations Based on a Chinese RST-annotated Corpus
Ming Yue, Haitao Liu · Journal of Quantitative Linguistics · 2011
This article investigates the probability distribution of discourse relations with respect to the categories of the rhetorical structure theory (RST). Twenty texts were randomly extracted from a Chinese RST-style discourse corpus, and the frequency distribution of different discourse relations was investigated. Results show that all the RST relations in all the 20 texts fit perfectly well with a modified right-truncated Zipf-Alekseev distribution. The investigation verifies that at discourse level, linguistic development also follows the diversification process.