Abstract

A method is described by which a rhetoricalstructure tree can bc realized by a text structure made up of sections, paragraphs, sentences, vertical lists, and other textual patterns, with discourse connectives added (in the correct positions) to mark rhetorical relations. We show that text-structuring can be forInulated as a Constraint Satisfaction Prob- lem, so that all solutions respecting constraints on text-structure formation and structural comt)atibility can be efficiently generated. Of the nany solutions generated by this method, some are stylistically preferable to others; we show how further constraints can be applied in order to select the best versions. Finally, we discuss some extensions such as the generation of indented text structures.

Citations