Analysing Rhetorical Structure as a Key Feature of Summary Coherence

摘要

We present a model for automatic scoring of coherence based on comparing the rhetorical structure (RS) of college student summaries in L2 (English) against expert summaries. Coherence is conceptualised as a construct consisting of a rhetorical relation and its arguments. Comparison with expert-assigned scores shows that RS scores correlate with both cohesion and coherence. Furthermore. RS scores improve the accuracy of a regression model for cohesion score prediction.