Comparing rhetorical structures in different languages: The influence of translation strategies

Abstract

The study we report in this article addresses the results of comparing the rhetorical trees from two different languages carried out by two annotators starting from the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). Furthermore, we investigate the methodology for a suitable evaluation, both quantitative and qualitative, of these trees. Our corpus contains abstracts of medical research articles written both in Spanish and Basque, and extracted from Gaceta Médica de Bilbao (‘Medical Journal of Bilbao’). The results demonstrate that almost half of the annotator disagreement is due to the use of translation strategies that notably affect rhetorical structures.