The Role of Plans in Discourse Generation

In this paper, I examine the role of intentional and informational structure in enabling a system to generate coherent multi-sentential texts in interactive settings. I review the plan-based model of discourse generation that I and my colleagues have developed, and examine the role of the speaker's communicative plans in generating expository text in an interactive environment. I provide examples of two phenomena that can be explained by appealing to the structure in discourse plans: interpreting and responding to the interlocutor's feedback in the context of the ongoing interaction, and determining the appropriate usage of discourse cues in the generation process.