Abstract
Many text planning systems are based on a theoretical linguistic approach which assumes the existence of relations between units of text. The relational approach most extensively used in text generation is the Rhetorical Structure Theory (rst, Mann and Thompson 1987). The phenomenon of multiple relations, i.e. the fact that in natural language texts we often find more than one relation holding between two text units, has not been treated by rst. In this paper we show how the taxonomy of discourse structure relations as proposed in Maier and Hovy (1991) can be exploited to account for a subtype of multiple relations. We also give an outline of a computational model to generate texts including multiple relations.
The author would like to thank John Bateman, Elena Not and Oliviero Stock for comments on previous versions of this paper. Much of this research was carried out while the author was a member of the Natural Language Processing Group at irst, Trento, Italy. This work was also partially funded by the German Federal Ministry for Research and Technology (BMFT) in the framework of the Verbmobil Project under grant 01IV101K/1. The responsibility for the contents of this study lies with the author.
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Maier, E. (1996). Textual relations as part of multiple links between text segments. In: Adorni, G., Zock, M. (eds) Trends in Natural Language Generation An Artificial Intelligence Perspective. EWNLG 1993. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1036. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-60800-1_24
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-60800-1_24
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