On The Necessity Of Intentions And The Usefulness Of Rhetorical Relations: A Position Paper

In this position paper, we argue Ibr the need for a generation system to represent communicative goals (i.e., goals that express the speaker's intent to aflect the bearer's mental attitudes), at least if certain tasks are to be achieved. We lurther argue that, wlfile rhetorical relations might be recoverable t tom other Iactors, they appear to be a useful level of abstraction to maintain about the discourse structure to avoid costly reasoning. However, we believe a source of conliasion comes Ii'om the Ihct that the term 'rhetorical relations' encompasses various diftbrent constraints about a discourse structure, and that there is a need to be clear about what a 'rhetorical relation' is.