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Abstract : |
In this paper, I present a model of the local organization of extended text. I show that texts with weak rhetorical structure and strong domain structure, such as descrip-tions of houses, digital circuits, and families, are best analyzed in terms of local domain structure, and ar-gue that global structures that may be inferred from a domain are not always appropriate for constructing descriptions in the domain. I present a system I am im-plementing that uses short-raTtge strategies to organize text, and show how part of a description is organized by these strategies. I also briefly discuss a model of incre-mental text generation that dovetails with the model of local organization presented here. Motivation for local organization The approach to organizing extended text described here has both psychological and computational moti-vation. It aims both to model how people use language and to provide a flexible architecture for a system's lan-guage use. In this section, I describe the empirical data that form the basis of this research, and characterize the local organization of the collected texts. In the next two sections, I describe a computational architec-ture to implement local text organization and discuss its advantages of generality and flexibility, and give an example of how this architecture works. An extended text has a structure; this structure is a description of how the components relate so that sense can be made of the whole. Two sources of this organiza-tion are rhetoricial structure, which describes the way elements of the text fit together, and domaitt structure, which describes relations among domain objects. For this research I chose three domains with strong domain structure, and a task--description--with weak rhetor-ical structure. I have tape-recorded 29 people giving descriptions of house layouts, electronic circuit layouts, and family relationships. Description fragments of a house and of a family, and the questions asked to ob-tain the descriptions, are given in figure 1. (Because of space considerations, the fragments are somewhat ab-breviated.), |
