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<Paper uid="W98-1403">
  <Title>A PRINCIPLED REPRESENTATION OF ATTRIBUTIVE DESCRIPTIONS FOR GENERATING INTEGRATED TEXT AND INFORMATION GRAPHICS PRESENTATIONS</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="18" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
*1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> This paper describes a media-independent, compositional, plan-based approach to representing attributiv e descriptions for use in integrated text and graphics generat!on. An attributive description's main function is to convey information directly contributing to the communicative goals of a discourse, whereas a referential description's only function is to enable the audience to identify a particular referent \[Donnellan1977, Kronfeld1986\]. While the generation of referential descriptions has received considerable attention in text and multimedia generation, the generation of attributive descriptions has received * relatively little attention in computational linguistics.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> : However, such descriptions are pervasive in the type of presentations which is the focus of our research. We are developing systems that automatically generate presentations consisting * of coordinated text and information graphics (graphics for presenting abstract, quantitative or relational information as opposed to depictions of real-world objects or processes). For example in our current implementation, the *system produces analyses and summarizations of large amounts of data created by a transportation scheduling program. In this domain, it is necessary to generate descriptions of aggregate quantities of complex attributes such as total port capacity of all ports and 90~ of the total weight* of the cargo arriving by day 25. Furthermore, in this genre both referential and attributive uses of descriptions occur. ..</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> in our approach, presentations are &amp;quot;generated *using .an architecture that integrates hierarchical Planning to achieve media-independen t communicative goals with task-based graphic design.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> This architecture has been implemented in a prototype system. The focus of this paper is on the representation and role of attributive descriptions in the architecture. First, we describe the referential-attributive distinction and its importance in dialogue and text generation. Next, we discuss its importance in task-based graphic design. After providing an overview of our architecture, we describe how attributive descriptions are planned. We conclude with a survey of related work.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"/>
  </Section>
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