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<Paper uid="P94-1007">
  <Title>GENERATING PRECONDITION EXPRESSIONS IN INSTRUCTIONAL TEXT</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
INTRODUCTION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Technical writers routinely employ a range of forms of expression for precondition expressions in instructional text. These forms are not randomly chosen from a pool of forms that say &amp;quot;basically the same thing&amp;quot; but are rather systematicaUy used based on elements of the communicative context.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Consider the following expressions of various kinds of procedural conditions taken from a corpus of instructional text: (la) If light flashes red, insert credit card again.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> (Airfone, 1991) l (lb) When the 7010 is installed and the battery has charged for twelve hours, move the OFF/STBY/TALK \[8\] switch to STBY.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> (Code-a-phone, 19891) (lc) The BATTERY LOW INDICATOR will light when the battery in the handset i~ low.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> (Excursion, 1989) (ld) Return the OFF/STBY/TALK switch to STBY a/ter your call. (Code-a-phone, 1989) (le) 1. Make sule the handset and base antennas are fully extended. 2. Set the OFF/STBY/TALK SWITCH to Talk.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> (Excltrsion, 1989) As can be seen here, procedural conditions may be expressed using a number of alternative l In this paper, a reference wiU be added to the end of all examples that have come directly from the corpus, indicating the ma~uual from which they were taken.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> lexical and grammatical forms. They may occur either before or after the expression of their related action (referred to here as the issue of slot), and may be linked with a variety of conjunctions or prepositions (the issue of linker). Further, they may be expressed in a number of grammatical forms, either as actions or as the relevant state brought about by such actions (called here the terminating condition). Finally, they may or may not be combined into a single sentence with the expression of their related action (the issue of clause combining).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> Text generation systems nmst not only be capable of producing these forms but must also know when to produce them. The study described here has employed a detailed corpus analysis to address these issues of choice and has implemented the results of this study in IMAGENE, an architecture for instructional text generation.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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