Paper Info
Title
The Local Organization of Text
Abstract
In this paper, I present a model of the local organization of extended text. I show that texts with weak rhetorical structure and strong domain structure, such as descrip- tions of houses, digital circuits, and families, are best analyzed in terms of local domain structure, and ar- gue that global structures that may be inferred from a domain are not always appropriate for constructing descriptions in the domain. I present a system I am im- plementing that uses short-raTtge strategies to organize text, and show how part of a description is organized by these strategies. I also briefly discuss a model of incre- mental text generation that dovetails with the model of local organization presented here. Motivation for local organization The approach to organizing extended text described here has both psychological and computational moti- vation. It aims both to model how people use language and to provide a flexible architecture for a system's lan- guage use. In this section, I describe the empirical data that form the basis of this research, and characterize the local organization of the collected texts. In the next two sections, I describe a computational architec- ture to implement local text organization and discuss its advantages of generality and flexibility, and give an example of how this architecture works. An extended text has a structure; this structure is a description of how the components relate so that sense can be made of the whole. Two sources of this organiza- tion are rhetoricial structure, which describes the way elements of the text fit together, and domaitt structure, which describes relations among domain objects. For this research I chose three domains with strong domain structure, and a task--descriptio n--with weak rhetor- ical structure. I have tape-recorded 29 people giving descriptions of house layouts, electronic circuit layouts, and family relationships. Description fragments of a house and of a family, and the questions asked to ob- tain the descriptions, are given in figure 1. (Because of space considerations, the fragments are somewhat ab- breviated.) Many approaches to text organization 1 are based on analyses of text in terms of rhetorical structure. However, there are few segments of text with inter- esting rhetorical structure in my corpus. For exam- ple, an analysis of the texts using Mann and Thomp- son's (1987) Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) would result primarily in the relations sequence and joint and would contain few of the the relations like evi- dence or justify that give RST its descriptive power. Similarly, it is unclear what work a system like that of Grosz and Sidner (1986) would do in analyzing a de- scription. Since the structure of descriptions cannot be ana- lyzed adequately with rhetorical relations, perhaps it can be explained in terms of the domain. Houses, chips, and families are strongly structured. A family's rela- tionships can be captured in a family tree; one might suppose that a description of the family would also be organized in this way. A house can be encoded in a number of ways; for instance, it has a component hier- archy, being composed of rooms composed of furnish- ings. Linde (1974) has proposed another comprehensive structure for houses: a phrase structure grammar that determines how the rooms may be visited in a traversal
Year
Venue
Keywords
1990
INLG
chip,digital circuits
Field
DocType
Citations 
Computer science,Natural language processing,Artificial intelligence,Linguistics
Conference
4
PageRank 
References 
Authors
1.08
10
1
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Penelope Sibun1284187.65