Choosing Rhetorical Structures To Plan Instructional Texts

Authors: Kosseim, Leila; Lapalme, Guy

Source: Computational Intelligence, Volume 16, Number 3, August 2000 , pp. 408-445(38)

Buy & download fulltext article:

Price: $48.00 plus tax (Refund Policy)

Abstract:

This paper discusses a fundamental problem in natural language generation: how to organize the content of a text in a coherent and natural way. In this research, we set out to determine the semantic content and the rhetorical structure of texts and to develop heuristics to perform this process automatically within a text generation framework. The study was performed on a specific language and textual genre: French instructional texts. From a corpus analysis of these texts, we determined nine senses typically communicated in instructional texts and seven rhetorical relations used to present these senses. From this analysis, we then developed a set of presentation heuristics that determine how the senses to be communicated should be organized rhetorically in order to create a coherent and natural text. The heuristics are based on five types of constraints: conceptual, semantic, rhetorical, pragmatic, and intentional constraints. To verify the heuristics, we developed thespinnatural language generation system, which performs all steps of text generation but focuses on the determination of the content and the rhetorical structure of the text.

Keywords: natural language generation; text planning; Rhetorical Structure Theory; instructional texts

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/0824-7935.00118

Publication date: 2000-08-01