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<Paper uid="W98-0210">
  <Title>A Media-Independent Content Language for Integrated Text and Graphics Generation</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="70" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> This paper describes a media-independent knowledge representation scheme, or content language, for describing the content of communicative goals and actions. The language is used within an intelligent system for automatically generating integrated text and information graphics 1 presentations about complex, quantitative information. The goal of the current implementation of the system is to produce analyses and summarizations of the quantitative data output by a transportation scheduling program.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> In our approach \[Kerpedjiev etal.1997a, Kerpedjiev et al.1997b, Green et a1.1998, This work was supported by DARPA contract number DAA-1593K0005. le.g., charts, tables, maps, rather than pictorial forms of representation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2">  Kerpedjiev et ai.1998\], the content and organization of a presentation is first planned at a media-independent level using a hierarchical planner \[Young1994\]. In this way, a high-level presentation goal, such as to assist the user to evaluate a transportation schedule created by the scheduling program, is ultimately decomposed into media-independent subgoals, whose content is represented in the content language.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The content language also is used to represent the content of the media-independent communicative acts, e.g., Assert and Recommend, selected by the planner to satisfy these subgoals. 2 Content language expressions are constructed by the plan constraint functions of the presentation plan operators during planning.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> The content language in the presentation plan is used by the system's two media-specific generators, one for text and one for information graphics. A media allocation component decides which parts of the plan shall be realized by each generator. The text generator transforms its assigned parts to sentence specifications, for realization by a general-purpose sentence generator (SURGE) \[Elhadad and Robin1996\].</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> The graphics generator transforms its assigned parts of the plan to a sequence of user tasks which a graphic must support in order to satisfy the presentation goals. The tasks are then input to a graphic design system (SAGE) 2In other words, the content language describes that which is to be asserted, recommended, believed, etc., rather than the types of communicative acts to be performed or propositional attitudes which the acts are intended to achieve.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> \[Roth and Mattis1990, Roth et a1.1994\] which automatically designs and realizes a graphic supporting the tasks.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> One of the requirements for our content language is the ability to represent complex descriptions of quantitative database attributes, such as total port capacity of all ports and 90~ of the total weight of the cargo arriving by clay 25. In addition to application-specific concepts such as port capacity, such descriptions involve the specification of application-independent quantitative relations (e.g., 90~ of ...), aggregate properties of sets (e.g., total ... of all ... ), and time-dependent relations (e.g., increase from ... to ... during the interval ...). Thus, we would like for the language to be able to express a wide range of quantitative and temporal relations and aggregate properties, rather than just those required for the current domain of transportation scheduling.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> Another requirement is for the content language to represent these descriptions compositionally. A compositional representation should facilitate the work of the text and graphics generators, as well as media coordination.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> A third requirement for the content language is the ability to represent subtle differences in communicative intention with respect to the same data. To give an example in the domain which will be used for illustration in the rest of the paper, the same data 3 could underly either the assertion that Three newspapers that are circulated in Pittsburgh carry only national news or the assertion that Three newspapers that carry only national news are circulated in Pittsburgh. However, while conveying the same facts about the three newspapers, the two assertions are not interchangeable. The first assertion would be more effective than the second in an argument such as Be careful which newspaper you read to find out what is going on locally. The 3All data used in the paper is fictitious. However, many of the examples were inspired by a naturally occuring example about the numbers of readers of newspapers read in Pittsburgh. We have selected this domain for illustration because it requires minimal background knowledge.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="10">  Post-Gazette covers both national and local news, but three newspapers that are circulated in Pittsburgh carry only national news.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="11"> while the second would be more effective than the first in Pittsburghers are interested in national affairs. In fact, three newspapers that carry only national news are circulated in Pittsburgh.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="12"> As will be shown later in the paper, the content language enables related assertions such as these to be differentiated.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="13"> A final requirement is for the representation scheme to be media-independent in order to provide a common input language for the media-specific generators. We assume that such a common language will facilitate the difficult problem of media coordination. On the other hand, the language must satisfy the needs of both the text and information graphics generators. null In the rest of the paper, first we describe the content language, focusing on aspects of the content language which are applicable to other domains. Next, we illustrate how subtle variations in communicative intention can be represented in the content language, and give examples of how they can be expressed in text and information graphics. Finally, we describe some related work.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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