Discourse Strategies for Describing Complex Physical Objects

In past work, discourse strategies, identified through analyses of naturally occurring texts, have been used in computer systems to guide a generation system in deciding what to say. In this paper, we describe the use of discourse strategies to guide the generation of descriptions of physical objects. In particular, we present a new type of strategy, the process strategy, which provides directives on how to trace the underlying knowledge base. Since the system has a set of possible strategies that can be used to generate descriptions of physical objects, we identify how a strategy can be selected based on information about the user and show how a system can combine several strategies in a single description so that it chooses the most appropriate strategy at each point in the generation process.