Analysing the Integration of Semantic Web Features for Document Planning across Genres

Language is usually studied and analysed from different disciplines generally on the premise that it constitutes a form of communication which pursues a specific objective. The discourse, in that sense, can be understood as a text which is constructed to express such objective. When a discourse is created, its production is related to some textual genre, usually connected with some pragmatic features, like the intention of the writer or the audience to whom is addressed, both conditioning the use of language. But genres can be considered as well as compounds of different pieces of text with a certain degree of order, each one seeking for more concrete objectives. This paper presents a proposal to learn such features as a way to generate richer document plans, applying clustering techniques over annotated documents. 1 Motivation and Research Context The current research is carried out from a conception of Natural Language Generation (NLG) for which the creation of a text requires an intermediate output called a document plan. It is by the macroplanning stage that the system provides this plan of selected and ordered content. At present, our work is focused on how to elaborate that plan in order to meet some requisites regarding flexibility of the system: it should be able to produce different outcomes conditioned by the communicative goal, the audience,... the context, on the whole. Henceforth, the main aim of our current research is to enrich the pragmatic facet of the NLG process. The expected outcome is a scheme or ordering of the ideas that should be realised in a set of cohesive and coherent sentences and paragraphs. According to some theories of the discourse (Bakhtin, 2010; Halliday et al., 2014), genres can be understood as social constructions that settle a connection between the discourse and the situation in which it is produced, reflected both in its structure and its content. According to Swavels (1990): “A genre comprises a class of communicative events, the members of which share some set of communicative purposes. These purposes are recognised by the expert members of the parent discourse community, and thereby constitute the rationale for the genre. This rationale shapes the schematic structure of the discourse and influences and constraints choice of content and style.” Besides, genres become interesting because they are related to communicative purposes in different manners, from a global viewpoint to fine-grained levels. As an example, we can think on the case of a person who is looking for recommendation in review pages. Recommending would be the main, global purpose of the text he consults when it was created. But it is possible that the writer also wanted to explain the motivation of the journey narrative, personal experience or to describe the facilities in order to complete his review. Narration, description, recommendation,... they represent low-level functions of the text related to the intention of the writer and, in some cases, they can be identified as different sets of sentences. This lead us to the possibility of learning the structure of the text and its features, which differs from one genre to another. In reviews, the presence and order of the parts is not strict. Maybe one traveller does not share his personal story, but also he describes the room and recommends the brand, while another one first evaluates and then describes. An example to illustrate this can be found in table 1. Conversely, it would make no sense to write a scientific article that reports the results before explaining the methodology or not explaining it at all, for example.