Content and Rhetorical Status Selection in Instructional Texts

This paper discusses an approach to planning the content of instructional texts. The research is based on a corpus study of 15 French procedural texts ranging from step--bystep device manuals to general artistic procedures. The approach taken starts from an AI task planner building a task representation, from which semantic carriers are selected. The most appropriate RST relations to communicate these carriers are then chosen according to heuristics developed during the corpus analysis. 1 I n t r o d u c t i o n A standard problem in text generation is to determine what to include in the text and how to structure it. The goal of this research is to s tudy how the content of instructional texts and their rhetorical structure can be selected automatically. The approach taken starts from a task representation developed by an AI planner, from which a set of semantic carriers, specifying the content of the text, is selected. Then the rhetorical relations that best communicate these semantic carriers are selected. The approach is based on a corpus analysis that determined: • What semantic carriers are found in instructional texts, where they can be found in the task representation and when they are included in the text. * What rhetorical relations are used to present the semantic carriers and when one is preferred over another. If these points are not dealt with, an instructional text generator may choose to say everything available in the task representation, and may communicate it using always the same rhetorical strategy. For example, the task of using the one touch record (OTR) feature of a VCR can be represented as in figure 11 . From this task representation, the following unacceptable text may be produced: To use the 0TR feature, set the speed selector to "SP", "SP" will light up; select channel 4; specify the recording time; emd press the TIMER button within 9 seconds, the TIMER indicator w£11 light up. To set the speed selector to °*SP", press the SP/EP button. The speed will change. To set channel 4, press the channel button. The channel will change. To specify the recording time, press the OTR button 3 times. To press the OTR button 3 times, press it once, PM 10:35; press it a second time, PM 11:05; press it a third time, PM 11:35. A more natural text would be~: