The Role of Saliency in Generating Natural Language Arguments

Abstract

Generating expressions which communicate information already known to the hearer, building enthymematic arguments, and characterising refutations all pose significant problems to traditional natural language generation techniques. After exploring these problems, an approach is proposed which through its employment of a notion of saliency handles them cleanly, and offers support for further features including clue word generation. It is argued that propositional salience and its interaction with intentional, attentional, epistemic and structural components of a text generation system have a key role to play in the design and realisation of persuasive text.