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International Workshop on Natural Language Generation

IWNLG 1992: Aspects of Automated Natural Language Generation pp 167–182Cite as

Abducing temporal discourse

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 587))

Abstract

We focus on the following question: given the causal and temporal relations between events in a knowledge base, what are the ways they can be described in extended text? We argue that we want to be able to generate laconic text, where certain temporal information remains implicit but pragmatically inferrable. An algorithm for generating laconic text is proposed, interleaving abduction and nonmonotonic deduction over a formal model of pragmatic implicature. We demonstrate that the nonmonotonicity ensures that the generation of laconic text is influenced by the preceding linguistic and extra-linguistic context.

The support of the Science and Engineering Research Council through project number Gr/g22077 is gratefully acknowledged. Hcrc is supported by the Economic and Social Research Council. We thank Robert Dale, Masato Ishizaki and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Cognitive Science and Human Communication Research Centre, University of Edinburgh, 2, Buccleuch Place, EH8 9LW, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK

    Alex Lascarides & Jon Oberlander

Authors
  1. Alex Lascarides
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  2. Jon Oberlander
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Editor information

R. Dale E. Hovy D. Rösner O. Stock

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© 1992 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Lascarides, A., Oberlander, J. (1992). Abducing temporal discourse. In: Dale, R., Hovy, E., Rösner, D., Stock, O. (eds) Aspects of Automated Natural Language Generation. IWNLG 1992. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 587. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-55399-1_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-55399-1_12

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-55399-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-47054-0

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