Content selection and organization as a process involving compromises
Helmut Horacek · 1994
Understanding a fairly complex message may demand an increasing degree of effort on behalf of the addressee, a fact that has been neglected almost completely in automated approaches to natural language generation so far. Encountering this problam requires making compromises by reducing the degree of detail in which information is presented, or by explicitly expressing information left implicit otherwise. We identify factors that influence the comprehension effort, and we develop a model that indicates a rough quantified estimate for this effort. We illustrate these ideas by examples of explanations comprising a considerable number of arguments, and we discuss potential impacts of these measurements on the process of composing a message by making compromises.