homework-12.md

Discourse parsing

In this homework, you will RST annotation of a short passage of text.

Provide an RST parse tree for the following text, which I have already segmented into discourse units. You can indicate the discourse parse either through a graph or through a list of relations. A description of the relations in RST can be found at http://www.sfu.ca/rst/01intro/intro.html

Here is the passage (note that my segmentation:

• 1. In today's society, college is ambiguous.
• 2. We need it to live,
• 3. but we also need it to love.
• 4. Moreover, without college most of the world's learning would be egregious.
• 5. College, however, has myriad costs.
• 6. One of the most important issues facing the world is how to reduce college costs.
• 7. Some have argued that college costs are due to the luxuries students now expect.
• 9. Others have argued that the costs are a result of athletics.
• 10. In reality, high college costs are the result of excessive pay for teaching assistants.

This passage is from Lee Perelman's amusing Essay for Robo-Reader. If you have taken the GRE, or think you might take it, I recommend you read it.