Experiments Using Stochastic Search for Text Planning

Abstract

Marcu has characterised an important and difficult problem in text planning: given a set of facts to convey and a set of rhetorical relations that can be used to link them together, how can one arrange this material so as to yield the best possible text? We describe experiments with a number of heuristic search methods for this task. 1 Introduction: Text Planning 1.1 The Task This paper presents some initial experiments using stochastic search methods for aspects of text planning. The work was motivated by the needs of the ILEX system for generating descriptions of musum artefacts (in particular, 20th Century jewellery) [Mellish et al 98]. We present results on examples semi-automatically generated from datastructures that exist within ILEX. Forming a set of facts about a piece of jewellery into a structure that yields a coherent text is a non-trivial problem. Rhetorical Structure Theory [Mann and Thompson 87] claims that a text is coherent just in case it can be analysed hierarchic...