Abstract
We describe in this paper a new text planner that has been designed to address several problems we had encountered in previous systems. Motivating factors include a clearer and more explicit separation of the declarative and procedural knowledge used in a text generation system as well as the identification of the distinct types of knowledge necessary to generate coherent discourse, such as communicative goals, text types, schemas, discourse structure relations, and theme development patterns. This knowledge is encoded as separate resources and integrated under a flexible planning process that draws from appropriate resources whatever knowledge is needed to construct a text. We describe the resources and the planning process and illustrate the ideas with an example.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Allen, J.F. Discourse Structure in the Trains Project. In Proceedings of the DARPA Speech and Natural Language Workshop, Morgan Kaufmann, San Mateo, 1991.
Biber, D. A Typology of English Texts. Linguistics, 27, 1989, pp. 3–43.
Cawsey, A. Generating Communicative Discourse. In Current Research in Natural Language Generation, Dale, R., Mellish, C., and Zock, M. (eds), Academic Press, Boston, 1990, pp. 75–102.
Clark, H.H. and Clark, E.V. Semantic distinctions and memory for complex sentences. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 20, 1968, pp. 129–138.
Daneš, F. Functional sentence perspective and the organization of the text. In F. Daneš (ed.) Papers on Functional Sentence Perspective. Mouton, The Hague, 1974.
de Beaugrande, R. Text, Discourse and Process. Ablex Publishing Corporation, Norwood, N.J., 1980.
Giora, R. On the Informativeness Requirement. Journal of Pragmatics 12, 1988, pp. 547–565.
Grimes, J.E. The Thread of Discourse. Mouton, The Hague 1975.
Grosz, B.J. and Sidner, C.L. Attention, Intentions, and the Structure of Discourse. In Journal of Computational Linguistics 12(3), 1986, pp. 175–204.
Halliday, M.A.K. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. Edward Arnold Press, Baltimore, 1985.
Halliday, M.A.K. and Hasan, R. Language, Context and Text: Aspects of Language in a Social-Semiotic Perspective. Deakin University Press, 1985.
Hobbs, J.R. Why is Discourse Coherent? Technical Note no.176, SRI International, Menlo Park CA, 1978.
Hovy, E.H. Planning coherent multisentence text. Proceedings of the ACL, Buffalo, 1988.
Hovy, E.H. Parsimonious and Profligate Approaches to the Question of Discourse Structure Relations. In Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Text Generation, Pittsburgh, 1990.
Hovy, E.H. and McCoy, K.F. Focusing your RST: A step toward generating coherent multisentential text. In Proceedings of the 11th Cognitive Science Conference, Ann Arbor, 1989, pp. 667–674.
Leech, G.N. Principles of Pragmatics. Longman, London, 1983.
MacGregor, R. A Deductive Pattern Matcher. In Proceedings of the 6th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1988, pp. 696–701.
Maier, E. and Hovy, E.H. A Metafunctionally Motivated Taxonomy for Discourse Structure Relations. In Proceedings of the 3rd European Workshop on Language Generation, Judenstein, Austria, March 1991, pp. 38–45.
Mann, W.C. and Matthiessen, C.M.I.M. Nigel: A Systemic Grammar for Text Generation. Research Report RR-83-105, USC/ISI. 1983.
Mann, W.C. An Overview of the Penman Text Generation System, Research Report ISI/RR-83-114, USC/ISI, 1983.
Mann, W.C. Discourse Structures for Text Generation. In Proceedings of the COLING Conference, Stanford, 1984.
Mann, W.C. and Matthiessen, C.M.I.M. Nigel: A Systemic Grammar for Text Generation. In R.Benson and J. Greaves, (eds), Systemic Perspectives on Discourse: Selected Papers Papers from the 9th International Systemics Workshop. Ablex, London, 1985.
Mann, W.C. and Matthiessen, C.M.I.M. and Thompson, S.A. Rhetorical Structure Theory and Text Analysis. Research Report ISI/RR-89-242, USC/ISI, 1989.
Mann, W.C. and Thompson, S.A. Rhetorical Structure Theory: Toward a Functional Theory of Text Organization. Text 8(3), 1988, pp. 243–281. Also available as USC/ISI Research Report RR-87-190.
Martin, J.R. 1992. English Text: System and Structure. Benjamins, Amsterdam. Forthcoming.
Maybury, M.T. Planning Multisentential English Text Using Communicative Acts. Ph.D.dissertation, Cambridge University, 1990. Also available as RADC Technical Report 90–411, 1990.
McCoy, K.F. and Cheng, J. Focus of attention: Constraining what can be said next. In Natural Language in Artificial Intelligence and Computational Linguistics, Paris, C.L., Swartout, W.R. and Mann, W.C.(eds), Kluwer, Boston, 1990, pp. 103–124.
McDonald, D.D. and Pustejovsky, J. Description-directed natural language generation. In Proceedings of the 9th IJCAI, Los Angeles, 1985.
McKeown, K.R. Text Generation: Using Discourse Strategies and Focus Constraints to Generate Natural Language Text. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985.
Mooney, D.J., Carberry, S. and McCoy, K.F. The Basic Block Model of Extended Explanations. In Proceedings of the AAAI Workshop on Explanations, Boston, 1990.
Moore, J.D. and Paris, C.L. Planning Text for Advisory Dialogues. In Proceedings of the 27th ACL Conference, Vancouver, 1989, pp. 67–75.
Paris, C.L. and Maier, E. Knowledge Sources or Decisions? Proceedings of the Workshop on Decisions in Natural Language Generation, IJCAI 1991, Sydney.
The Penman Documentation. 5 unpublished volumes, USC/ISI.
Polanyi, L. A Formal Model of the Structure of Discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 12, 1988, pp. 601–638.
Prideaux, G.D. Text data as evidence for language processing principles: The grammar of ordered events. In Language Sciences, 11, 1989, pp. 27–42.
Prideaux, G.D. Syntactic form and textual rhetoric: The cognitive basis for certain pragmatic principles. Journal of Pragmatics, 16, 1991, pp. 113–129.
Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G. and Svartvik, J. A Grammar of Contemporary English. Seminar Press, New York, 1972.
Redeker, G. Ideational and Pragmatic Markers of Discourse Structure. Journal of Pragmatics 14, 1990, pp. 367–381.
Sanders, T.J.M., Spooren, W.P.M.S., and Noordman, L.G.M. Towards a Taxonomy of Coherence Relations. In Discourse Processes, 1992 (forthcoming)
Sidner, C.L. Focusing and Discourse. Discourse Processes 6, 1983, pp. 107–130.
Suthers, D.D. A Task Appropriate Hybrid Architecture for Explanation. Computational Intelligence, 7(4), 1991.
Trimble, L. English for Science and Technology. A Discourse Approach. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985.
Van Dijk, T.A. and Kintsch, W. Strategies of Discourse Comprehension. Academic Press, New York, 1983.
Wanner, L. and Maier E. Lexical Choice as an Integrated Component of Situated Text Planning, Proceedings of the 3rd European Natural Language Generation Workshop, Innsbruck, March, 1991.
Werth, P. Focus, Coherence and Emphasis. Croom Helm, London. 1984.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1992 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Hovy, E., Lavid, J., Maier, E., Mittal, V., Paris, C. (1992). Employing knowledge resources in a new text planner architecture. 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_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-55399-1_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-55399-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-47054-0
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive