Observations And Directions In Text Structure

1 Introduction Early work in text, structuring, such as [McK85] and [MTSS] showed tha,t texts of all types and genres seem to be COml)osed of a small mHnl)er of simple, intuitive units, wl.riously referred to as rhetorical relations and rhetorical predicates. These two bodies of work dii[hred in whether these units were best viewed as the bricks or the mortar of text structure, hut in either case a small set of primitives seemed to suffice for all texts. McKeown showed how a text generation system can make use of these sorts of primitives to produce coherent, informative texts. However, not: long after that, it became obvious that McKeown's schematized 1)lock-sta.cking apl~roach to generation compiled out too much information about a speaker's intentional goals in choosing the blocks s/he did, and that more of this information should he recorded in the process of text structuring to a.llow for such niceties as flexibility in • auswering follow up questions or requests for elaboration. Following this l'ea.sonillg, [MS91] instead utilized the more "mortar-centered" al)I)roach of RST for text gener:L, tion.