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<Paper uid="P84-1002">
  <Title>CONVEYING IMPLICIT CONTENT IN NARRATIVE SUMMARW~S</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
BACKGROUND
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> This research builds on our previous work on narrative structure and generation. We are using Plot Units \[Lchnert 1981\] to represent the structure of the ori~nal narrative, and use Mumble \[McDonald 1983\] to do the linguistic realiTAtion. To connect these two facilities we have a new interface and a new text plannin~ (c)omponeng named Plot units are a technique for organizing the conceptual representation of a narrative in such a way that the topological structure of the representation directly indicates which events are central to the story and which are peripheral. A graph of connected plot units is constructed for a story as it is understood, based on the recognition of goal-oriented behavior by the characters and their affective reactions to events. Plot units summarize larger-scale relationships among explicit and implicit events in the story, and are oriented toward long term recall rather than appreciation of story style or specific wording.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Mumble is a &amp;quot;realization&amp;quot; module for language generation; it takes a stream of output from a text planner and incrementally produces fluent, cohesive En~ligh text in accordance with the planner's spec/ficatious. The planner decides what information should be imparted and most of its rhetorical features; Mumble filters those decis/ons in accordance with grammatical constraints, handles syntax and morphology, and performs the &amp;quot;smoothing&amp;quot; operations that are required by the discourse context in which the information aIvears.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> 1. This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under contracts IST-8217502 and IST-8104984, and in part by the Office of Naval Research under coatract N00014.E3-K-0~0.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Precis stands between the plot unit graph and Mumble.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> h has been under development for a only short time and the ultimate form that its architecture will take is not yet fixed. We have so far been working bottom up, experimenting with different ways to combine the texts contributed by individual units and affect states, and trying to understand the consequences of the alternatives.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> We report here on one key &amp;quot;tactical&amp;quot; problem in narrative summarization which we refer to as conceptual ell~sis, omitting those events from a summary that we expect an audience to be able to infer on their own, and reinforcing that inference through a judicious choice of textual form.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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