Conclusions

This paper has presented the RST-Tool, a graphical interface for marking up the rhetorical structure of text. The tool is useful for several reasons:

1. Reducing Analysis Time: the tool reduces the amount of time taken to analyse text, compared with hand-analysis, or text-based entry. The tool allows easy creation of structures, and modification if needed.

2. Figure Preparation: The tool provides an easy way to prepare figures depicting RST structure for inclusion in documents.

The RST-Tool has also proved useful in its role as document preparation software for variable-length document presentation. While some summarisation systems attempt to use automatically recognition of RST structure, software has not yet been developed which provides reliable automatic recognition of RST structure over unrestricted text. However, good progress in this direction is being made by Ono et al. 1994; Marcu (1996); Hoffman (1996), etc.