From Local to Global Coherence: A Bottom-up Approach to Text Planning

Abstract

We present a new, data-driven approach to text planning, which can be used not only to map full knowledge pools into natural language texts, but also to generate texts that satisfy multiple, high-level communicative goals. The approach explains how global coherence can be achieved by exploiting the local coherence constraints of rhetorical relations. The local constraints were derived from a corpus analysis. Motivation 1 All current flexible approaches to text planning that assume that the abstract structure of text is a tree-like structure are, esentially, top-down approaches. Some of them define plan operators and exploit hierarchical planning techniques (Hovy 1993; Moore and Paris 1993; Moore and Swartout 1991; Cawsey 1991; Maybury 1992) and partial-order planning techniques (Young and Moore 1994). Others assume that plans are hierarchically organized sets of frames that can be derived through a top-down expansion process (Nirenburg et al. 1989; Meteer 1992). And the recursive app...