Text generation programs need to be designed around a theory of text organization. This paper introduces Rhetorical Structure Theory, a theory of text structure in which each region of text has a central nuclear part and a number of satellites related to it. A natural text is analyzed as an example, the mechanisms of the theory are identified, and their formalization is discussed. In a comparison, Rhetorical Structure Theory is found to be more comprehensive and more informative about text function than the text organization parts of previous text generation systems.
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William C. Mann (1984) studied this question.