We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2009
In this research, I have shown how principles of discourse structure, discourse coherency, and relevancy criterion can be used for the task of generating natural language text. Each of these areas is particularly important since the generation of text and not simply the generation of single sentences was studied. In this section, the principles and their incorporation as part of the text generation method are reviewed. Some limitations of the generation method are then discussed and finally, some possibilities for future research are presented.
Discourse structure
A central thesis of this research is based on the observation that descriptions of the same information may vary from one telling to the next. This indicates that information need not be described in the same way in which it is stored. For the generation process, this means that production of text does not simply trace the knowledge representation. Instead, standard principles for communication are used to organize a text. These rhetorical techniques are used to guide the generation process in the TEXT system. Since different rhetorical techniques are associated with different discourse purposes, it was shown that different descriptions of the same information can be produced depending upon the discourse situation. By incorporating commonly used techniques for communication into its answers, the system is able to convey information more effectively.
Relevancy criterion
It was pointed out that, when speaking, people are able to ignore large bodies of knowledge and focus on information that is relevant to the current discourse purpose. By constraining focus of attention to relevant information, a generation system is able to determine more efficiently what should be said next.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
