Building Monologue

To build an argument and particularly an argument presented as a monologue a writer must assemble and marshal a battery of supports for a claim. Some of those supports will be arranged in convergent structures, some as linked; some will be expressed, some will be left implicit; sometimes a support will need further support of its own and sometimes, not. This paper explores the factors which lead a writer to make particular choices, the interactions between those factors, and the constraints on a writer’s freedom in exercising her power, drawing on recent findings in computational modelling of the generation process. Introduction Within Artificial Intelligence (AI), there is growing interest in the field of Natural Language Generation (NLG), and the design of algorithms for rendering some communicative goal in an appropriate linguistic form. Given the intricate constraints at morphological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic levels, the preoccupation in NLG has been upon producing text which is coherent. Yet it is becoming clear that this focus not only leads to wildly underspecified structural representations, but that it also ignores important aspects of the intentions behind a given discourse encounter. These problems are particularly pertinent to the generation of textual argumentation, where merely coherent text may very well fail to be persuasive (assuming, for the time being, that persuasion is the most common goal of argumentation), and may thus fail to service the communicator’s aims at all. In addition to the basic intention of a speaker to create an argument which is textually coherent, she is also concerned with ensuring the coherency of the argument (a higher level constraint concerned with placement of premises and conclusions), deciding which material to include and which to omit (rather than the more usual approach, adopted in NLG, of communicating everything), and deciding within the foregoing restrictions how best to arrange the argument components. All of these interacting goals are derived from a small set of overarching intentions, typically including one of convincing the hearer that some conclusion holds.