To computationalists investigating the structure of coherent discourse, the following questions have become increasingly important over the past few years: Can one describe the structure of discourse using interclausal relations? If so, what interclausal relations are there? How many are required? A fair amount of controversy exists, ranging from the parsimonious position (that two intentional ...

In this paper, we address the problem of planning the textual organization of instructions. We take the view that natural language generation (NLG) is a mapping process of diierent levels of conceptual and textual representations. Within this framework , we consider the mapping between the text's semantic representation and its rhetorical structure. We argue that such a mapping is not direct, b...

Explanation and argumentation are fundamental to reasoning. They are therefore of some importance to artificial intelligence. Discourse-based reasoning (DBR) is a knowledge representation technology that uses natural patterns of discourse as a basis for a structural ontology of explanatory and argumentative reasoning. By this means, we may ontologize the reasoning process itself, thus rendering...

This paper argues for more precise deenitions of rhetorical relations that have often been proposed as intermediate forms between modules of text generators. As a case in point, we describe the problems we encountered when we combined two text generator systems that we initially thought were complementary: one dealt with \what to say?" and the other with the \how to say?". This experiment broug...

This paper provides a logically precise analysis of agreement and disputes in dialogue. The semantics distinguishes among the public commitments of each dialogue agent, including commitments to relational speech acts or rhetorical relations (e.g., Narration, Explanation, Correction). Agreement is defined to be the shared entailments of the agents’ public commitments. We show that this makes pre...

This paper presents a joint model designed to measure local text coherence that uses Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) and entity grids. The purpose is to learn patterns of entity distribution in texts by considering entity transition sequences and organizational/discourse information using RST relations in order to create a predictive model that is able to distinguish coherent from incoherent ...

We are concerned with the proper form for the structures which serve as the output of strategic generation and the input to tactical generation. How should the elements of this structure be discovered and how they should be arranged? In both respects, our proposals will contrast with those of Rhetorical Structure Theory [Mann and Thompson]. Major components of the structure are discourse relati...

RSTTool is a graphical tool for annotating a text in terms of its rhetorical structure. The demonstration will show the various interfaces of the tool, focusing on its ease of use. 1 I n t r o d u c t i o n This paper describes the RSTTool, a graphical interface for marking up the structure of text. While primarily intended to be used for marking up Rhetorical Structure (cf. Rhetorical Structur...

1. Introduction Over the last decade, the research goals in natural language generation have shi fred fi'om the generation of isolated sentences to the production of coherent multi-sentence paragraphs. Two major aspects of the generation process have been focused on: deciding 'what to say' (the strategic level) and deciding 'how to say it' (the tactical level). In 1985, McKeown designed one of ...