Choosing Rhetorical Relations in Instructional Texts: the Case of Eeects and Guidances

In this paper, we address the problem of planning the textual organization of instructions. We take the view that natural language generation (NLG) is a mapping process of diierent levels of conceptual and textual representations. Within this framework , we consider the mapping between the text's semantic representation and its rhetorical structure. We argue that such a mapping is not direct, but rather many-to-many, and give concrete examples of such a phenomenon in instructional texts. We then discuss the case of two semantic elements (called here semantic carriers), namely eeects and guidances, we determine by what rhetorical relations they are most frequently realized in instructional texts, and nally, we show how such a mapping can be performed automatically within a text generation system.