1. Introduction

This manual describes the RST Tool, a graphical interface for marking up the structure of text. While primarily intended to be used for Rhetorical Structure (cf. Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST): Mann & Thompson 1988), the tool also allows the mark-up of constituency-style analysis, as in the Generic Structure Potential (GSP - cf. Hasan 1984; Halliday & Hasan 1985).

The tool works under Windows, Macintosh, UNIX and  LINUX operating systems, and requires the pre-installation of Tcl/Tk, a scripting language engine. Installation of Tcl/Tk is straightforward, and is described below.

The Tool consists of four interfaces:

• Text Segmentation: for marking the boundaries between text segments;

• Text Structuring: for marking the structural relations between these segments;

• Relation Editor: for maintaining the set of discourse relations, and schemas.

• Statistics: for deriving simple descriptive statistics based on your analysis.

The next section will outline how to get started with the RSTTool, installation and launching. Later sections will outline how to segment and structure a text.