Structure and Rules in Automated Multimedia Presentation Planning

Abstract

During the planning of multimedia presentations, at least two distinct processes are required: planning the underlying discourse structure (that is, ordering and interrelating the information to be presented) and allocating the media (that is, delimiting the portions to be displayed by each individual medium). The former process has been the topic of several studies in the area of text planning, but numerous questions remain for the latter, including: What is the nature of the allocation process --- what does it start with and what does it produce? What information does it depend on? How should the two processes be performed --- sequentially, interleaved, or simultaneously? In this paper, we define Discourse Structure and Presentation Structure and outline the kinds of information that media allocation rules must depend on, including, centrally, information about the discourse structure. We describe a prototype planning system that performs the information-to-media allocation, arguing ...