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Customizing RST for the automatic production of technical manuals

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Aspects of Automated Natural Language Generation (IWNLG 1992)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 587))

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Abstract

Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) has emerged as a promising candidate for text representation in NLG. We investigated the applicability of RST in the automatic production of multilingual technical manuals. Starting from a domain knowledge base, we construct an RST-tree for a particular manual section, which is then converted to a set of sentence plans. These plans serve as input to sentence generators that produce the final text. In this paper, we report first on a number of open questions regarding general aspects of RST. Arguing that the original set of RST relations is not specific enough for practical generation purposes, we suggest a number of new relations that we found useful in our domain. After briefly examining the stage of RST tree construction, we then outline a procedure for converting RST trees to a sequence of sentence plans.

Part of the work reported in this paper was carried out during an internship at FAW Ulm funded from the ICSI exchange program. The work has also been supported by a University of Toronto Open Doctoral Fellowship.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. FAW, P.O.Box 2060, D -7900, Ulm, Germany

    Dietmar Rösner

  2. Dept. of Computer Science, University of Toronto, M5S 1A4, Toronto, Canada

    Manfred Stede

Authors
  1. Dietmar Rösner
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  2. Manfred Stede
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Editor information

R. Dale E. Hovy D. Rösner O. Stock

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© 1992 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Rösner, D., Stede, M. (1992). Customizing RST for the automatic production of technical manuals. In: Dale, R., Hovy, E., Rösner, D., Stock, O. (eds) Aspects of Automated Natural Language Generation. IWNLG 1992. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 587. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-55399-1_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-55399-1_14

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-55399-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-47054-0

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