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Discourse Strategies for Describing Complex Physical Objects

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Natural Language Generation

Part of the book series: NATO ASI Series ((NSSE,volume 135))

Abstract

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.

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© 1987 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht

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Paris, C.L., McKeown, K.R. (1987). Discourse Strategies for Describing Complex Physical Objects. In: Kempen, G. (eds) Natural Language Generation. NATO ASI Series, vol 135. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3645-4_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3645-4_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-94-010-8131-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-009-3645-4

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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