# eRST: A Signaled Graph Theory of Discourse Relations and Organization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.13560 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13560/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 128 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03975/) (2016)
- [Universal Dependencies v2: An Evergrowing Multilingual Treebank Collection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10643/) (2020)
- [Molweni: A Challenge Multiparty Dialogues-based Machine Reading Comprehension Dataset with Discourse Structure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05080/) (2020)
- [DMRST: A Joint Framework for Document-Level Multilingual RST Discourse Segmentation and Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04518/) (2021)
- [SciDTB: Discourse Dependency TreeBank for Scientific Abstracts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03653/) (2018)
- [DiscoPrompt: Path Prediction Prompt Tuning for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03973/) (2023)
- [GENTLE: A Genre-Diverse Multilayer Challenge Set for English NLP and Linguistic Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01966/) (2023)
- [Adversarial Connective-exploiting Networks for Implicit Discourse Relation Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00217/) (2017)
- [Improving Implicit Discourse Relation Classification by Modeling Inter-dependencies of Discourse Units in a Paragraph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05918/) (2018)
- [Incorporating Distributions of Discourse Structure for Long Document Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16784/) (2023)
- [DisCoDisCo at the DISRPT2021 Shared Task: A System for Discourse Segmentation, Classification, and Connective Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09777/) (2021)
- [GCDT: A Chinese RST Treebank for Multigenre and Multilingual Discourse Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10449/) (2022)
- [Probing Multilingual Language Models for Discourse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04832/) (2021)
- [All Roads Lead to UD: Converting Stanford and Penn Parses to English Universal Dependencies with Multilayer Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00522/) (2019)
- [AMALGUM -- A Free, Balanced, Multilayer English Web Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10677/) (2020)
- [Unifying Discourse Resources with Dependency Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00167/) (2021)
- [Quality and Efficiency of Manual Annotation: Pre-annotation Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09307/) (2023)
- [Towards Understanding Large-Scale Discourse Structures in Pre-Trained and Fine-Tuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04289/) (2022)
- [Zero-shot Chinese Discourse Dependency Parsing via Cross-lingual Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12014/) (2019)
- [Unleashing the Power of Neural Discourse Parsers -- A Context and Structure Aware Approach Using Large Scale Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.03203/) (2020)
- [Improving Topic Segmentation by Injecting Discourse Dependencies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08626/) (2022)
- [A Simple and Strong Baseline for End-to-End Neural RST-style Discourse Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08355/) (2022)
- [Beyond The Wall Street Journal: Anchoring and Comparing Discourse Signals across Genres](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00516/) (2019)
- [What's Hard in English RST Parsing? Predictive Models for Error Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04940/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [GDTB: Genre Diverse Data for English Shallow Discourse Parsing across Modalities, Text Types, and Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00491/) (2024)
- [Probing LLMs for Multilingual Discourse Generalization Through a Unified Label Set](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10515/) (2025)
- [Discursive Circuits: How Do Language Models Understand Discourse Relations?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11210/) (2025)
- [Bridging Discourse Treebanks with a Unified Rhetorical Structure Parser](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06427/) (2025)
- [Rethinking the Relationship between the Power Law and Hierarchical Structures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04984/) (2025)
- [DeDisCo at the DISRPT 2025 Shared Task: A System for Discourse Relation Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11498/) (2025)
- [Disco-RAG: Discourse-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04377/) (2026)
- [LLMSR@XLLM25: An Empirical Study of LLM for Structural Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12328/) (2025)
- [Unpacking Ambiguity: The Interaction of Polysemous Discourse Markers and Non-DM Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16748/) (2025)
- [What makes an entity salient in discourse?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16464/) (2025)
- [Human Label Variation in Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22723/) (2026)
- [DiscoExplorer: An Open Interface for the Study of Multilingual Discourse Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15304/) (2026)
- [Using LMs to Model the Effects of Context and Coreference during Sentence Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32119/) (2026)
- [Worth Their Weights? Evaluating Generative Models for Discourse Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.17658/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this article we present Enhanced Rhetorical Structure Theory (eRST), a new theoretical framework for computational discourse analysis, based on an expansion of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). The framework encompasses discourse relation graphs with tree-breaking, non-projective and concurrent relations, as well as implicit and explicit signals which give explainable rationales to our analyses. We survey shortcomings of RST and other existing frameworks, such as Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT), the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) and Discourse Dependencies, and address these using constructs in the proposed theory. We provide annotation, search and visualization tools for data, and present and evaluate a freely available corpus of English annotated according to our framework, encompassing 12 spoken and written genres with over 200K tokens. Finally, we discuss automatic parsing, evaluation metrics and applications for data in our framework.