Integrating Discourse Markers into a Pipelined Natural Language Generation Architecture

Pipelined Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems have grown increasingly complex as architectural modules were added to support language functionalities such as referring expressions, lexical choice, and revision. This has given rise to discussions about the relative placement of these new modules in the overall architecture. Recent work on another aspect of multi-paragraph text, discourse markers, indicates it is time to consider where a discourse marker insertion algorithm fits in. We present examples which suggest that in a pipelined NLG architecture, the best approach is to strongly tie it to a revision component. Finally, we evaluate the approach in a working multi-page system.