Abducing Temporal Discourse

We focus on the following question: given the causal and temporal relations between events in a knowledge base, what are the ways they can be described in extended text? We argue that we want to be able to generate laconic text, where certain temporal information remains implicit but pragmatically inferrable. An algorithm for generating laconic text is proposed, interleaving abduction and nonmonotonic deduction over a formal model of pragmatic implicature. We demonstrate that the nonmonotonicity ensures that the generation of laconic text is in-uenced by the preceding linguistic and extra-linguistic context.