Rhetorical structure analysis (RSA) explores discourse relations among elementary discourse units (EDUs) in a text. It is very useful in many text processing tasks employing relationships among EDUs such as text understanding, summarization, and question-answering. Thai language with its distinctive linguistic characteristics requires a unique technique. This article proposes an approach for Thai rhetorical structure analysis. First, EDUs are segmented by two hidden Markov models derived from syntactic rules. A rhetorical structure tree is constructed from a clustering technique with its similarity measure derived from Thai semantic rules. Then, a decision tree whose features derived from the semantic rules is used to determine discourse relations.

IEEE format, International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security, IJCSIS January 2010, ISSN 1947 5500, http://sites.google.com/site/ijcsis/