Sequence and Emphasis in Automated Domain-Independent Discourse Generation

For humans to gain comprehensive views of large amounts of repository contents, they need to have insight into the relations among information objects. It is a challenge to automatically generate presentations of repository contents, through, for example, search results, which reveal such relations to readers. Such presentations must reflect properties of information objects such that large sets of information objects appear as a coherent whole. An approach to this is generation of discourse structures that convey such properties of information objects in presentations. Semantic Web technology provides a conceptual basis for generation of discourse in Web-based information environments. This paper describes automatic generation of sequence and emphasis in presentations of information objects. It shows generation of object sequences and emphasis in accordance with a user input of relevance of information attributes in our Topia architecture. The resulting presentations allow users to encounter information objects in decreasing order of relevance. This makes it easier to identify relevant information objects among many others, as well as to observe their relations with the other information objects. 1998 ACM Computing Classification System: H.5.4, H.5.1, I.7,2