Planning Coherent Multisentential Text

By Eduard H. Hovy. 1988

Though most text generators are capable of simply stringing together more than one sentence, they cannot determine which order will ensure a coherent paragraph. A paragraph is coherent when the information in successive sentences follows some pattern of inference or of knowledge with which the hearer is familiar. To signal such inferences, speakers usually use relations that link successive sentences in fixed ways. A set of 20 relations that span most of what people usually say in English is proposed in the Rhetorical Structure Theory of Mann and Thompson. This paper describes the formalization of these relations and their use in a prototype text planner that structures input elements into coherent paragraphs.

Subfields: Natural Language Processing, Natural Language Generation

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Citations in the corpus

A Model of Coherence Based on Distributed Sentence Representation (2014, methodology): “Several researchers in the 1980s and 1990s addressed the problem, the most influential of which include: Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST; (Mann and Thompson, 1988)), which defined about 25 relations that govern clause interdependencies and ordering and give rise to text tree structures; the stepwis”
Book Reviews: Building Natural Language Generation Systems (2000, methodology): “se tasks. On the other end of the sophistication spectrum, many standard AI techniques have been adopted for content determination and text planning, including rule-based systems [RML95] and planning [Hov88]. Systems built in this way are in principal very ﬂexible and powerful, although in practice ”
Generating Interactive Explanations (1991, background): “Related Research: Previous work on text planninghas been concerned with generating coherent para-graph length texts given some communicative goal orpool of knowledge to convey (McKeown, 1985; Hovy,1988; Paris, 1988; Moore & Paris, 1988).”