A Repository of Rules and Lexical Resources for Discourse Structure Analysis: the Case of Explanation Structures

In this paper, we present an analysis method, a set of rules, lexical resources dedicated to discourse relation identification, in particular for explanation analysis. The following relations are described with prototypical rules: instructions, advice, warnings, illustration, restatement, purpose, condition, circumstance, concession, contrast and some forms of causes. Rules are developed for French and English. The approach used to describe the analysis of such relations is basically generative and also provides a conceptual view of explanation. The implementation is realized in Dislog, using the <TextCoop> logic-based platform, that also allows for the integration of knowledge and reasoning into rules describing the structure of explanation