Employing knowledge resources in a new text planner architecture

This paper describes a new text planner that has been designed to address several problems the authors had encountered in previous systems and describes the resources and the planning process and illustrates the ideas with an example.

Abstract

We describe in this paper a new text planner that has been designed to address several problems we had encountered in previous systems. Motivating factors include a clearer and more explicit separation of the declarative and procedural knowledge used in a text generation system as well as the identification of the distinct types of knowledge necessary to generate coherent discourse, such as communicative goals, text types, schemas, discourse structure relations, and theme development patterns. This knowledge is encoded as separate resources and integrated under a flexible planning process that draws from appropriate resources whatever knowledge is needed to construct a text. We describe the resources and the planning process and illustrate the ideas with an example.