Structure and Rules in Automated Multimedia Presentation Planning

During the planning of multimedia presentations, at least two distinct processes are required: planning the underlying discourse structure (that is, ordering and interrelating the information to be presented) and allocating the media (that is, delimiting the portions to be displayed by each individual medium). The former process has been the topic of several studies in the area of text planning, but numerous questions remain for the latter, including: What is the nature of the allocation process | what does it start with and what does it produce? What information does it depend on? How should the two processes be performed | sequentially, interleaved, or simultaneously? In this paper, we deene Discourse Structure and Presentation Structure and outline the kinds of information that media allocation rules must depend on, including, centrally, information about the discourse structure. We describe a prototype planning system that performs the information-to-media allocation, arguing that since media allocation rules depend on the characteristics of the information to be presented, they can only be applied once the overall discourse structure has been essentially planned out and the individual portions of information have become apparent. spent a research visit of six months at USC/ISI working on this project for her Master's degree. Views and conclusions contained in this report are the authors' and should not be interpreted as representing the oocial opinion or policy of DARPA, RL, the U.S. Government, or any person or agency connected with them. The automated creation of multimedia presentations contains a number of challenging and interesting problems. Given a collection of information to display, what is the nature of the process of designing a multimedia presentation? What information does the process start with and what does it produce? On what information are its decision criteria based? Borrowing from the conceptually related eld of automated text generation, one might consider starting with a text planner that performs the tasks of information selection and organization, and then add to that a process that allocates the information to speciic media for presentation. In fact, one may hope that a single planning mechanism rather like a text planner will perform all three these tasks simultaneously; after all, it is dealing with the same information in all cases. Unfortunately, this appealing idea is not feasible. We argue in this paper that such integration cannot work because since the information-to-medium allocation process depends upon the overall structure of the discourse, …