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<Paper uid="C88-1076">
  <Title>On the Rble of Old Information in Generating Readable Text: A Psychological and Computational Definition Of &amp;quot;Old&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;New&amp;quot; Information in the NOSVO System</Title>
  <Section position="4" start_page="374" end_page="374" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
4.2.7 The LC-CA
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The Linguistic Converter and Category Analyzer analyzes the old information to determine its syntactico-semantic category. It checks whether it is a prepositional phrase, agent, theme or instrument, in that order. It then decides if the old infomaation is an internal or external argument or a prepositional phrase adjunct. With this informatiion it picks the type of grammar that will place the particular argument or adjunct first and sends the choice along with the predicate to the English generator.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1">  The English generator is a prolog grammar segmented into the various old information first syntaxes, e.g.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> prepositional phrase first, object first rules, and a plain vanilla syntax. At this point all, or most, of the intelligent work has been done and the generator is nothing more than a syntactic manipulator under the direction of the Linguistic Co,wetter and Category Analyzer.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> 5.0 Future Research and Directions Future research and development topics for NOSVO include: 1. determining when information cannot be assumed to be in the listener's common ground, i.e., at what level of priming is a concept not in the listeners common ground?; 2. expanding NOSVO's capability to handle ellipsis, definiteness, and pronominalization and investigate how the generation of ellipsis an.d definiteness affects the generation of old information fin:st; 3. extending NOSVO to do more of the linguistic generation from either a more &amp;quot;conceptual&amp;quot; representation or to take as input another source langauge such as another natural language or a computer program and generate English from that underlying representation, i.e. expand NOSVO's backend; 4. extending NOSVO's capabilities to handle the subtle distinction between arguments and adjuncts; 5. determining how much the nonapplication or missapplication of the old infolxnation first principle, discussed above, makes a difference in reading and understanding text; 6. finally, investigating other old information first syntactic structures and phenomena to determine how they affect a discourse and how they might be integrated into NOSVO.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> The next generation of NOSVO will be written in CLOS and Lisp. The application will be &amp;quot;generating descriptions of Lisp programs&amp;quot;. CLOS objects will be used to organize the knowledge structures and CLOS methods will be used to do tile actual parsing. Eventually NOSVO will be expanded and refined along the directions stated above.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="5" start_page="374" end_page="375" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
Acknowledgements
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> I would like to thank Kent Bimson, Mirjam Fried, Randy LaPolla, Marie Meteor and Varda Shaked for all their help and criticism on this abstract. Any mistakes arc my own.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="6" start_page="375" end_page="375" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
APPENDIX A
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In this Appendix we have given two examples of text that NOSVO can generate. The text was based upon naturally occurring text (Lawrence 1985). The old information first principle has been applied to the first text. It has not been applied to the second text. We believe that the second text is stilted, less cohesive and harder to read, though this has yet to be proven experimentally. We also believe that the missapplication of the old information first principle would be worse than its nonapplication. These are topics left for future research.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="7" start_page="375" end_page="375" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
TEXTI
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Long before I was tall enough to ride on the big coaster myself, I spent many pleasant hours persuading my reluctant father to accompany me.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> As an aficionado of amusement parks I was overjoyed when our whole family finally flew to California to tackle Walt Disney's extravaganza.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> .More than two decades later, I'm still journeying to parks. (page 4)</Paragraph>
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