The Discourse Relations Reference Corpus is a resource for those interested in the study of discourse relations from a corpus linguistics perspective. It contains RST analyses of 65 texts.

The materials in this corpus are taken from three different sources:

• Texts from this web site (14 texts)
• Annotated Wall Street Journal articles from the RST Discourse Treebank (21 texts)
• Review texts from the SFU Review Corpus (30 texts, divided into 15 movie and 15 book reviews)

The documents in each of the subcorpora have been annotated with RSTTool. Although the background to all subcorpora is Rhetorical Structure Theory, and they have been annotated with RSTTool, we believe that the corpus is useful to anyone interested in discourse relations, from whatever perspective. The annotations provide rich information on what relations are more common; how they are commonly signalled; and how relations are distributed in different genres.

The corpus is available as a pdf file, or as a zipped pdf. You can also download a zip file of the analysis files (.rs2, .rs3 or .lisp), which can be opened using RSTTool.

• Corpus, pdf (67 Mb)
• Corpus, zipped pdf (49 Mb)
• Corpus, zipped analysis files (300 Kb)

To cite the corpus:
Maite Taboada and Jan Renkema (2008) Discourse Relations Reference Corpus [Corpus]. Simon Fraser University and Tilburg University. Available from http://www.sfu.ca/rst/06tools/discourse_relations_corpus.html.