Generating effective natural language instructions based on agent expertise
Juliet C. Bourne, Bonnie Webber · 1999
GENERATING EFFECTIVE NATURAL LANGUAGE INSTRUCTIONS BASED ON AGENT EXPERTISE Juliet C. Bourne Supervisor: Dr. Bonnie Webber The automatic production of Natural Language instructions, i.e. those suitable for use by humans, has become an active area of research in recent years. In order for computergenerated instructions to be useful, they must be effective in accurately conveying the actions that are to be carried out by an agent. Conveying termination information, or when to stop performing an action, has been the focus of my dissertation research as it is an important part of generating effective instructions. I have done a corpus analysis of 3000 simple step-by-step maintenance instructions to study how termination information is expressed in naturally occurring texts. Using insights gained from the corpus analysis as well as the simulation of virtual agents carrying out similar tasks, I have specified an action representation, rules for reasoning about action information (particu...