Parsimonious or Profligate: How Many and Which Discourse Structure Relations?
Abstract: Over the past ten years, researchers studying the structure of discourse have consistently had to face questions such as the following: Given that discourses consist of segments, how do the segments relate? What intersegment relations are there? How many are needed? A fair amount of controversy exists, ranging from the parsimonious position (that two basic relations suffice) to the profligate position (that an open-ended set of semantic/rhetorical relations is required). This paper outlines the arguments and then summarizes a survey of the conclusions of approximately 30 researchers — from linguists to computational linguists to philosophers to Artificial Intelligence workers. It fuses and taxonomizes the more than 400 relations they have proposed into a hierarchy of approximately 70 increasingly semantic relations, and argues that though the taxonomy is open-ended in one dimension, it is bounded in the other and therefore does not give rise to anarchy. Some evidence is prov
