shoochoon/what-is-art-rst

RST-Inspired Rhetorical Annotation of Tolstoy's What Is Art?

A discourse annotation dataset for Leo Tolstoy's What Is Art? (1904), produced using a functionally adapted RST scheme designed for argumentative and philosophical prose. The annotations were created as part of a study on stance-conditioned fallacy judgment in philosophical argumentation, currently under review.

Source Text

Tolstoy, L. (1904). What is art? Funk & Wagnalls. Retrieved from Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/64908

The annotated corpus covers approximately 62,395 words, drawn from the English translation (1904), excluding the preface and the concluding chapter, where sustained argumentation is limited.

Annotation Methodology

Theoretical basis

Annotation follows a functionally adapted RST scheme (Mann & Thompson, 1988), operationalized for argumentative rather than narrative or expository discourse. The core RST distinction between Nucleus (N) and Satellite (S) is retained as a structural heuristic for separating claims from supporting material:

• Nucleus: units that introduce new argumentative content or develop the text's overarching theses (functioning as claims)
• Satellite: dependent or elaborative material that primarily serves to justify, warrant, or back the associated Nucleus

Adaptations to standard RST

Standard RST requires completeness, connectedness, uniqueness, and adjacency of text spans. The adjacency and uniqueness constraints were deliberately relaxed:

• Non-adjacency: Nuclei and Satellites are linked across non-contiguous text spans in order to capture long-range argumentative dependencies, which are frequent in Tolstoy's discursive style
• Coarse segmentation: EDUs primarily correspond to full sentences rather than clauses, following Kobayashi et al. (2019), who report improved model performance with less granular segmentation
• Completeness deprioritized: accuracy of argumentative link identification was prioritized over strict RST tree coherence, as the goal is argument mining rather than discourse structure visualization

Relation set

The original RST taxonomy (20+ relations) was collapsed into 12 functional categories suited to philosophical argumentation. Relations with closely aligned argumentative functions were merged; the Justify relation was omitted as its function is embedded in the broader argumentative structure of philosophical prose.

Label	Original RST relation(s)	Function
Elaboration	Elaboration, Explanation	Elaborative support to a claim
Evaluation	Evaluation	Assessment or judgment of a situation or opinion
Context	Circumstance, Background	Objective contextual information enhancing the central idea
Contrast	Antithesis, Contrast, Concession	Differences or opposing perspectives relative to another statement
Contingency	Condition, Otherwise	Restriction on the application of a statement
Enablement	Enablement	Indication that a preceding statement enables or supports a claim
Evidence	Evidence	Support based on evidence
Motive	Motivation, Purpose	Support based on motivation or purpose
Outcome	Cause, Result, Sequence	Causal or resultant effect of a statement
Solutionhood	Solutionhood	Proposed solution or answer to a question
Interpretation	Interpretation	Author's explanatory perspective on a statement
Restatement	Restatement, Summary	Reiteration or summary of a claim

Annotation tool and annotator

Annotation was carried out in Label Studio (Tkachenko et al., 2020–2025). Due to resource constraints and the specialized nature of the task, the corpus was annotated by a single expert annotator trained in both philosophical and linguistic analysis.

Dataset Statistics

Metric	Value
Corpus size	~62,395 words
Total annotated spans	1,256
Nucleus (N) spans	134
Satellite (S) spans	1,121
S:N ratio	8.4:1
Total relations	1,238

Relation type distribution

Relation	Count	%
Elaboration	679	54.8%
Evaluation	134	10.8%
Contrast	132	10.7%
Restatement	83	6.7%
Outcome	54	4.4%
Evidence	50	4.0%
Interpretation	27	2.2%
Context	25	2.0%
Solutionhood	19	1.5%
Motive	13	1.1%
Contingency	10	0.8%
Enablement	5	0.4%

Nucleus satellite load

Each Nucleus carries on average 2.7 Satellites (median: 2, maximum: 9), reflecting Tolstoy's characteristic argumentative pattern of anchoring a central claim with multiple elaborative, evaluative, and contrastive satellites.

File Format

The dataset is provided as a single JSON file exported from Label Studio (annotation_pretty.json). Each annotation record contains:

• id: Label Studio internal task ID
• annotations[].result: list of annotation objects, each of type labels (text span with N/S label) or relation (directed link between two spans with a relation label)
  • Span objects include value.start, value.end, value.text, and value.labels
  • Relation objects include from_id, to_id, direction, and labels

Intended Uses

• Argument mining in philosophical and literary prose
• RST-based discourse analysis with relaxed structural constraints
• Stance-conditioned fallacy detection (primary downstream task in the associated paper)
• Study of elaboration chain structure in non-standard argumentative texts
• Benchmark development for coarse-grained rhetorical annotation

Associated Paper

Zhang, [Name]. Stance-dependent fallacy judgments and rhetorical structure: a computationally assisted case study of Tolstoy's What Is Art? Argumentation, under review.

References

Kobayashi, N., Hirao, T., Kamigaito, H., Okumura, M., & Nagata, M. (2019). Split or merge: Which is better for unsupervised RST parsing? Proceedings of EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019, 3626–3636.

Mann, W. C., & Thompson, S. A. (1988). Rhetorical structure theory: Toward a functional theory of text organization. Text, 8(3), 243–281.

Tkachenko, M., Malyuk, M., Holmberg, A., Liubimov, N., & Fabricius-Hansen, C. (2020–2025). Label Studio: Data labeling software. https://github.com/HumanSignal/label-studio

Tolstoy, L. (1904). What is art? Funk & Wagnalls. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/64908

License

The annotation is original scholarly work. The source text (What Is Art?, 1904) is in the public domain.