The Generation of High-Level Structure for Extended Explanations

This paper analyzes the structural features of naturally-occurring extended explanations and argues that current generation methodologies are inadequate for determining high-level structure. It presents a computational model based on the hypothesis that high-level structure - composed of a unifying framework and its associated basic blocks - can be determined by bottom-up processes that attempt to satisfy speaker, listener, and compositional goals, after which top-down strategies can be used to organize the material about the selected framework.