Text Generation in a Dynamic Hypertext Environment
Maria Milosavljevic, Adrian Tulloch · 2003
This paper describes PEBA-II, a working natural language generation system which interactively describes animals in a taxonomic knowledge base via the production of World Wide Web pages. Our aim is to construct a natural language document generation system with real practical applicability: to this end, the system reconstructs and combines a number of existing ideas in the literature in a novel way, and proposes a solution to the problem of breadth of coverage that is based on a pragmatic approach to knowledge representation and linguistic realisation. The system embodies the following features: ffl a reconstruction of some of the core ideas in schema--based text generation [McKeown 1985], applied to the generation of hypertext documents; ffl the principled use of a phrasal lexicon to ease surface generation, in concert with a knowledge base whose elements may correspond to pre--compiled collections of atomic units; ffl a user model and discourse model that permit interesting varia...