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<Paper uid="P82-1028">
  <Title>THE TEXT SYSTEM FO~NATURAL LANGUAGE GENERATION: AN OVERVIEW*</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1.0 INTRODUCTION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Deciding what to say and how to organize it effectively are two issues of particular importance to the generation of natural language text. In the past, researchers have concentrated on local issues concerning the syntactic and lexical choices involved in transforming a pre-determined message into natural language. The research described here ~nphasizes a computational Solution to the more global problems of determining the content and textual shape of what is to be said. ~re specifically, my goals have been the development and application of principles of discourse structure, discourse coherency, and relevancy criterion to the computer generation of text. These principles have been realized in the TEXT system, reported on in this paper.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The main features of the generation method used in TEXT include I) an ability to select relevant information, 2) a system for pairing rhetorical techniques (such as analogy) with discourse purv~ses (such as defining terms) and 3) a focusing mec~mnism. Rhetorical techniques, which encode aspects of discourse structure, guide the selection of information for inclusion in the text from a relevant knowledge poq~l - a subset of *This work was partially supported by National Science ~Dundation grant #MCS81-07290.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> the knowledge base which contains information relevant to the discourse purpose. The focusing mechanism helps maintain discourse coherency. It aids in the organization of the message by constraining the selection of information to be talked about next to that which ties in with the previous discourse in an appropriate way. These processes are described in more detail after setting out the framework of the system.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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