Media - independent Communicative Actions in Integrated Text andGraphics

The research reported here is part of an ongoing eeort to design systems which can automatically generate integrated text and information graphics presentations. We are investigating the integration of two complementary approaches: hierarchical planning and task-based graphic design. A hierarchical planner is used to construct a media-independent plan of illocutionary actions which are ultimately decomposed into primitive actions of predicating and referring. This paper describes a proposed representation for complex referring actions. We provide an example presentation and discuss how its referring intentions would be represented in this approach, and discuss some implications of this approach for text and graphics generation.