Finally, my rhetorical parser uses only surface-form methods for determining the markers and textual units and uses clause-like units as the minimal units of the discourse trees.
according to the results derived from the corpus analysis, the use of the discourse marker although at the beginning of a sentence or paragraph correlates with a rhetorical relation of ELaBORaTION that holds between a satellite, the sentence or paragraph that contains the marker, and a nucleus, the sentence or paragraph that precedes it.