This paper discusses the application of a previously reported theory of explanation rhetoric (Maybury, 1988b) to the task of explaining constraint violations in a hybrid rule/frame based system for resource allocation (Dawson et al, 1987). This research illustrates how discourse strategies of explanation, textual connectives, and additional justification knowledge can be applied to enhance the ...

This thesis is an inquiry into the nature of the high-level, rhetorical structure of unrestricted natural language texts, computational means to enable its derivation, and two applications (in automatic summarization and natural language generation) that follow from the ability to build such structures automatically. The thesis proposes a rst-order formalization of the high-level, rhetorical st...

We present a natural language generator that produces a range of medical reports on the clinical histories of cancer patients, and discuss the problem of conceptual restatement in generating various textual views of the same conceptual content. We focus on two features of our system: the demand for “loose paraphrases” between the various reports on a given patient, with a high degree of semanti...

In this paper, I show how textual structure is recursive in nature; that is, the same rhetorical strategies that are available for constructing the text’s macrostructure are available for constructing its sub-sequences as well, resulting in a hierarchically structured text. The recursive formalism presented can be used by a generation system to vary the amount of detail it presents for the same...

The paper proposes a meta language model that can dynamically incorporate the influence of wider discourse context. The model provides a conditional probability in forms of P (text|context), where the context can be arbitrary length of text, and is used to influence the probability distribution over documents. A preliminary evaluation using a 3-gram model as the base language model shows signif...

Principles of visXcerpt. The Semantic Web aims at enhancing data and service retrieval on the Web using meta-data and automated reasoning. Meta-data on the Semantic Web is heterogeneous. Several formalisms have been proposed. RDF, Topic Maps and OWL, e.g., and some of these formalisms have already a large number of syntactic variants. Like Web data, Web meta-data will be highly distributed. Thu...

A general outline of a theory of reasoned dialogue is presented as an underlying basis of critical analysis of a text of argument discourse. This theory is applied to the analysis of informal fallacies by showing how textual evidence can be brought to bear in argument reconstruction, Several basic types of dialogue are identified and described, but the persuasive type of dialogue is emphasized ...

As a grammatical device, Theme-Rheme structure plays an important role in organizing and analyzing discourse. Theme Progression patterns (hereinafter called TP patterns) are significant method of the analysis of textual cohesion and organization. Based on linguist Danes’ theory about TP patterns, this paper tries to present a contrastive analysis of the texts of consecutive interpretation in En...