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<Paper uid="W98-1414">
  <Title>Institut fiir Wissensund Sprachverarbeitung -Abstract</Title>
  <Section position="9" start_page="135" end_page="136" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
6 Summary
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Present-day text generation systems typically employ quite simplified approaches for signalling discourse relations in text. Our work aims at enabling generators to truly choose discourse markers on the basis of generation parameters and context. This way, we gain variety in marker usage that is not just random but controlled. Furthermore, we are interested in a uniform, declarative representation of the information necessary. Approaches that encode marker choice in the grammar (such as Vander Linden \[1994\]), while certainly an improvement over previous h l mappings between relations and markers, loose flexibility when it comes to account for the interactions between marker choice and other sentence planning decisions.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> These considerations led us to develop a lexicon of discourse markers. While its construction is still in progress, we have shown samples of the kind of representations we are aiming at, and we have demonstrated how such lexicon entries can be employed as a resource in the sentence planning phase of the generation process. In our framework, lexicon entries consist of applicability conditions (for deciding whether the marker is a candidate at all), partial sentence semantic specifications (for combining the marker with neighbouring constituents), and distinguishing features for paradigmatic choice. We have described how an input discourse structure tree can be linearized into a sequence  of sentence plans, given a sentence planner that exploits the information supplied by a discourse marker lexicon.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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