<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="P94-1007">
  <Title>GENERATING PRECONDITION EXPRESSIONS IN INSTRUCTIONAL TEXT</Title>
  <Section position="10" start_page="48" end_page="48" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
CONCLUSIONS
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> This study has employed a knowledge intensive corpus analysis to identify the elements of the communicative context which can be used to determine the appropriate lexical and grammatical form of precondition expressions in instructional texts. The methodology provides a principled means for cataloging the use of lefical and grammatical forms in particular registers, and is thus critical for any text generation project. The current study of precondition expressions in instructions can be seen as providing the sort of register specific data required for some current approaches to register-based text generation (Bateman and Paris. 1991).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The methodology is designed to identify covariation between elements of the communicative context on the one hand and grammatical form on the other. Such covariations, however: do not constitute proof that the technical writer actually considers those elements during the generation process; nor that the prescribed form is actually more effective than any other. Proof of either of these issues would require psycholinguistic testing. This work provides detailed prescriptions concerning how such testing could be performed: i.e.: what forms should be tested and what contexts controlled for: but does not actually perform them (cf. Vander Linden: 1993a).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The analysis was carried out by hand (with the help of a relational database): and as such was tedious and limited in size. The prospect of automation: however: is not a promising one at this point. While it might be possible to automaticall)' parse the grammatical and lexical forms: it remains unclear how to automate the determination of the complex semantic and pragmatic features relevant to choice in generation. It might be possible to use automated learning procedures (Quinlan: 1986) to construct the system networks~ but this assumes that one is given the set of relevant features to start with.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Future work on this project will include attempts to automate parts of the process to facilitate the use of larger corlmra, and the implementation of the data structures and code necessary to automate the inquiry process.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>