On the Development and Evaluation of a Brazilian Portuguese Discourse Parser

We present in this paper the development process and the evaluation procedure of a Brazilian Portuguese discourse parser called DiZer. Based on Rhetorical Structure Theory, DiZer is a symbolic cue phrase-based analyzer that makes use of discourse templates learned from a corpus of scientific texts to identify and build the discourse structure of texts. DiZer evaluation shows satisfactory results for scientific and news texts, even tough it was not designed for the latter, which demonstrates DiZer portability.