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<Paper uid="P98-1118">
  <Title>A Framework for Customizable Generation of Hypertext Presentations</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Presenting information through text and hyper-text has become a major area of research and development. Complex systems must often deal with a rapidly growing amount of information.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> In this context, there is a need for presentation techniques facilitating a rapid development and customization of the presentations according to particular standards or preferences. Typically, the overall task of generating a presentation is decomposed into several subtasks including: macro-planning or text planning (determining output content and structure), micro-planning or sentence planning (determining abstract target language resources to express content, such as lexical items and syntactic constructions and aggregating the representations), realization (producing the text string) and formatting (determining the formatting marks to insert in the text string). Developing an application to present the information for a given domain is often a time-consuming operation requiring the implementation from scratch of domain communication knowledge (Kittredge et al., 1991) required for the different generation subtasks. In this technical note and demo we present a new presentation framework, PRE-SENTOR, whose main purpose is to facilitate the development of presentation applications. PRESENTOR has been used with success in different domains including object model description (Lavoie et al., 1997), weather forecasting (Kittredge and Lavoie, 1998) and system requirements summarization (Ehrhart et al., 1998; Barzilay et al., 1998). PRESENTOR has the following characteristics, which we believe are unique in this combination: * PRESENTOR modules are implemented in Java and C++. It is therefore easily portable cross-platform.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> * PRESENTOR modules use declarative knowledge interpreted at run-time which can be customized by non-programmers without changing the modules.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> * PRESENTOR uses rich presentation plans (or exemplars) (Rambow et al., 1998) which can be used to specify the presentation at different levels of abstraction (rhetorical, conceptual, syntactic, and surface form) and which can be used for deep or shallow generation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> In Section 2, we describe the overall architecture of PRESENTOR. In Section 3 to Section 6, we present the different specifications used to define domain communication knowledge and linguistic knowledge. Finally, in Section 7, we describe the outlook for PRESENTOR.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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