The DArt system: constructive text, diagram and layout generation for information presentation
John A. Bateman, Thomas Kamps, Klaus Reichenberger · 1999
In this paper we present the prototype artist biography information system DArt , a system for automatically producing multimodal pages of information that appropriately combine textual and graphical representation styles. We concentrate particularly on the selection and function of layout in these pages and demonstrate that layout offers a rich resource for achieving presentational coherence. Layout mechanisms have been developed on the basis of an empirical investigation of professionally produced layouts. These decompose communicative goal structures into layout structures that constrain the placement of automatically generated graphical, diagrammatic and textual elements. Our system builds on an architectural synthesis of data-driven aggregation in information visualization and communicative-goal oriented natural language generation. The paper introduces the component technologies employed, describes the methodology adopted for the empirical investigation of multimodal page layout, and shows the results as implemented within DArt .