<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="C96-1050">
  <Title>Mithras Annexe</Title>
  <Section position="8" start_page="296" end_page="296" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
4 Conclusions and Implications
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In this paper, we have gone some way towards isolating the specific point in the generation procedure at which pragmatic information such as rhetorical relation must be brought into play.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Since our notion of semantic content is based on a formal model of the task plan to be conveyed to the instruction user, the significance of the approach is clear for developing natural language generation applications within this limited domain. In particular, for rhetorical planning of the communication of particular content, we can use the preferences observed for selection of the preferred rhetorical relation in the language in question. Second, we can use our knowledge of how that relation is constituted and expressed in terms of syntax for marking the relation appropriately. null The approach also reveals some interesting facts about the individual languages. In particular, we found different levels of tolerance of residual ambiguity: Portuguese has little ambiguity in the mapping from semantic content to syntactic realisation (the least ambiguous markers of rhetorical relation, fewest available syntactic realisations, least overlap in the roles of these realisations for conveying one or the other semantic relation, most restricted set of favoured rhetorical relations). English, on the other hand, had the opposite characteristics. We also found differing preferences for rhetorical relations in expressing semantic content: for example, while Portuguese expresses generation in over 80% of cases with the relation of PURPOSE, French generation divides this relation almost equally between PURPOSE and MEANS. The English corpus, on the other hand, while it has a strong showing for PURPOSE (around 50%), reveals a relatively strong showing (around 14%) for the relation of RESULT, a relation found in only 1.5% of the Portuguese relations and not at all in French.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> No natural language has an unambiguous mapping from semantics to surface syntax, which makes the information encoded by syntax, both semantic and pragmatic, very difficult to consciously 'unpack' from surface form in the performance of the translation task. We suggest that uncovering the decisions necessary for producing pragmatically-appropriate sets of parallel instructions is a task best performed as an empirical study along the lines suggested here. In this way, we can encode language-specific pragmatic principles into tools that support the process of multi-lingual document production.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>