<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="A92-1007">
  <Title>Automatic Generation of Multimodal Weather Reports from Datasets</Title>
  <Section position="9" start_page="54" end_page="54" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
8 Conclusion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The system presented in this paper interprets a weather dataset and generates a multimodal report. The following features distinguish the method from similar projects carried out elsewhere: * Various weather documents have been analyzed to determine their structures and to define a language that allows the user to specify the generated product with respect to mode, content, style, length and precision of the information.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> * A knowledge-based technique for selection of the discourse structure of the generated document has been devised on the basis of typical rhetorical schemas and relations defined in the TKB.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> * The system controls the precision of the assertions extracted. Information with a low precision rate is rendered as a sentence with lexical indicators of imprecision (e.g. in some portions, possibly), which warn the user to accept the corresponding assertions with a certain degree of reservation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> * The cartographical presentation, though superior in many respects to the textual presentation, still suffers from the lack of proper means of expression for certain elements such as time and precision of the information. Therefore, a map may he supplemented with a concise verbal comment on the underspecified elements. Thus the two modalities, NL and graphics, complementing each other offer a highly expressive and efficient weather report.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> The system has been implemented in Pascal on an IBM PC. The TKB is filled in with models of the general-purpose short-range weather forecasts for Bulgaria. The grammatical knowledge base and the lexicon contain styles corresponding to subsets of Bulgarian and English. Experiments have been performed with datasets compiled at the National Weather Service in Sofia.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> In order to make the system practical it has to be coupled with a layout manager. Thus the user will be able to specify the arrangement of the different units in the plane.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> Another point of future work is the enrichment of the weather model with attributes summarizing the weather over a longer period (say five days) taking into account climatic data. Thus the system will be able to extract and render more interesting facts about the weather.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> A promising research area which may contribute to the further development of the system is user modeling. Experimentation in this area can be combined with the various applications of weather reports.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>