RAG-RST: Retrieved Exemplars as In-Context Discourse Schema for RST Parsing

Abstract

In Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), each edge of a discourse tree carries a nuclearity label, marking which span holds the central content, and a relation drawn from a closed inventory of functional categories. Neither label is a surface property: the same two clauses can be Elaboration or Background depending on rhetorical intent, and the boundary between them is fixed by annotation convention rather than by lexical cues. Predicting these labels therefore requires a formal discourse schema, and exposure to discourse-rich pretraining text does not supply it: given only a target EDU pair, a strong LLM recovers nuclearity at 0.794 F1 and relation at 0.738 F1. We propose RAG-RST, a retrieval-augmented framework that supplies this schema as in-context demonstration rather than through parameter updates, raising nuclearity to 0.846 F1 and relation to 0.788 F1 with no training. Two configurations are compared: a precomputed strategy that labels all EDU pairs before parsing, and a dynamic strategy that retrieves at each reduce step, so that the exemplars reaching the generator depend on the reductions the parser has already committed to. Both outperform existing RST parsers across span, nuclearity, relation, and full tree metrics, with the dynamic variant consistently strongest. Two properties of the retrieved schema emerge: its utility is bounded in number, saturating and then declining beyond fifty exemplars, and it depends on structural position. Both indicate that a formal linguistic schema can be supplied to a foundation model as a demonstration rather than trained into its parameters.