The Role of Underlying Structure in Text Generation

While a coherent organization is necessary for the generation of a multisentential paragraph, this organization itself conveys information, such as what knowledge is primary and what is secondary, and which of the various possible relationships between the pieces of knowledge the speaker wishes to make explicit. The organization of the message is an integral part of the message. Given this, it is wrong to assign the task of text structuring to any component other than the one that desires to convey the message in the first place. This paper describes George, a proposed system that organizes its text before the task of generation is begun. Particular attention is given to a new knowledge base paradigm called functional hierarchy, which is designed to facilitate explanation generation, and how it can be used to build Rhetorical Structure Theory representations that specify text organization before actual generation is begun.