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<Paper uid="W94-0326">
  <Title>CONTENT SELECTION AND ORGANIZATION AS A PROCESS INVOLVING COMPROMISES</Title>
  <Section position="6" start_page="223" end_page="223" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
4, CONCLUSION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> A mechanism assessing the comprehension effort of the addressee of a text or an utterance certainly seems to be of interest for theoretical models of natural language generation processes. While the proposal entailed in our method can hardly be considered a psychologically motivated approach, we believe that it contributes to the understanding of what ingredients a performance-oriented model of natural language generation should consist of, and how interaction between these ingredients can suitably be organized.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Apart from a purely theoretical perspective, we believe that these considerations are also relevant in practice, even if an assessment of the comprehension effort of the addressee does not manifest itself in the majority of generator programs themselves - which also may not even prove necessary in a good deal of applications. Hence, for simpler, eventually application-oriented systems, taking these considerations into account will help in making explicit the assumptions underlying the simplifications embodied, so that conditions for an eventual transfer to other domains become more evident - hence, the assumptions must hold across domains.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> However, it will be important to know about a system's limitations, where they manifest themselves, and when they are likely to weaken the system's usefulness.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Conditions under which assessing the complexity of a message to be generated may prove benefieial, hold in at least the following types of application: * Presenting a significant quantity of records selected from a database; when envisioning an ambitious, flexible presentation, summary facilities play a crucial role based on suitable assessments in the spirit of our method.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> * Generating business reports including a considerable amount of (heterogeneous) data, where summaries also play an important role; in that genre, it is the contextual inferability of information from some key propositions conveyed, which constitute the main difficulty. Hence, a quality assessment function has to take this particular aspect into account, whereas other influences on the ease of comprehension can be widely neglected.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> * Explaining an issue of at least moderate complexity (for instance, presenting a chain of rules or a set of constraints with underlying justifications) in explanation generation; all aspects neglected in report generation (degree of detail, slructure, acquaintance with terms) bear a significant amount of relevance here, and they should be incorporated in a suitable quality function.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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