Customizing RST for the Automatic Production of Technical Manuals

Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) has emerged as a promising candidate for text representation in NLG. We investigated the applicability of RST in the automatic production of multilingual technical manuals. Starting from a domain knowledge base, we construct an RST-tree for a particular manual section, which is then converted to a set of sentence plans. These plans serve as input to sentence generators that produce the final text. In this paper, we report first on a number of open questions regarding general aspects of RST. Arguing that the original set of RST relations is not specific enough for practical generation purposes, we suggest a number of new relations that we found useful in our domain. After briefly examining the stage of RST tree construction, we then outline a procedure for converting RST trees to a sequence of sentence plans.