On the need for domain communication knowledge

Much research in text planning has been oriented towards identifying the rhetorical component of communication knowledge that allows for the structuring of coherent multi‐sentential or even multi‐paragraph text. However, several researchers have recently found rhetoric‐based top‐down approaches to be inadequate for their particular needs. In this paper, we explore the issue by introducing the concept of “domain communication knowledge” as a new analytical tool. By analyzing two existing rhetoric‐based text planners, and by closely analyzing a particular genre, namely reports, we conclude that domain‐specific knowledge about communication is pervasive and should be represented explicitly for the text planning task.

[1]  Richard Kittredge,et al.  Sublanguage : studies of language in restricted semantic domains , 1982 .

[2]  Alain Polguère,et al.  Synthesizing Weather Forecasts from Formatted Data , 1986, COLING.

[3]  William C. Mann,et al.  RHETORICAL STRUCTURE THEORY: A THEORY OF TEXT ORGANIZATION , 1987 .

[4]  Cécile Paris,et al.  Tailoring Object Descriptions to a User's Level of Expertise , 1988, Comput. Linguistics.

[5]  Eduard H. Hovy,et al.  Planning Coherent Multisentential Text , 1988, ACL.

[6]  Johanna D. Moore,et al.  A Reactive Approach to Explanation , 1989, IJCAI.

[7]  Johanna D. Moore,et al.  Planning Text for Advisory Dialogues , 1989, ACL.

[8]  Eduard H. Hovy.  Parsimonious and Profligate Approaches to the Question of Discourse Structure Relations , 1990, INLG.

[9]  Alain Polguère,et al.  Bilingual Generation of Weather Forecasts in an Operations Environment , 1990, COLING.

[10]  Owen Rambow.  Domain Communication Knowledge , 1990, INLG.

[11]  Ursula Wolz,et al.  An Object Oriented Approach to Content Planning for Text Generation , 1990, INLG.

[12]  Robert Alan Granville.  The Role of Underlying Structure in Text Generation , 1990, INLG.

[13]  Guy Lapalme,et al.  Text generation , 1990 .

[14]  Penelope Sibun,et al.  The Local Organization of Text , 1990, INLG.

[15]  Marie Wenzel Meteer,et al.  The “GENERATION GAP”: the problem of expressibility in text planning , 1990 .

[16]  Daniel D. Suthers.  A task‐appropriate hybrid architecture for explanation , 1991 .

[17]  William R. Swartout,et al.  A Reactive Approach to Explanation: Taking the User’s Feedback into Account , 1991 .

[18]  Sandra Carberry,et al.  Capturing high‐level structure of naturally occurring, extended explanations using bottom‐up strategies , 1991 .

[19]  Kathleen McKeown,et al.  Text generation: using discourse strategies and focus constraints to generate natural language text , 1985 .