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<Paper uid="W00-1418">
  <Title>Optimising text quality in generation from relational databases</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="133" type="relat">
    <SectionTitle>
2 Related Work
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> It should be clear that the task we are discussing is very distinct from the task of response generation in a natural language interface to a database (e.g., see Androutsopoulos et al. (1995)). 'In such systtems, the role of text planning is quite simple or absent, usually dealing with single sentences, or in the most * * complex systems;~ a:single:sentence ,answer ~with an additional clause or two of supporting information.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> ILEX is not a query response generation system, it is an object description system. It composes a full text, at whatever size, with the goal of making that text a coherent discourse.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2">  and was made t1~ :lgfl~ It has an ....</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> elaborate aesign; specifically It h~ floral mows.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> : :;::anlllustrat~too, In fact., shg did qttite, a'l~ of,-: : &amp;quot; differei~tl~rpes of creative Wark;/cwdleiTls * : i:. :. ;: :i'; ~:t~n Arts. amt Craft#Style . ),.::.:):i:.: 2 ,} :,i.: :'i:' :&amp;quot; :'::' ; :-'? ;~.~,~t,~I,t~,,/~l.a~.~_~': ~&amp;quot; ; :&amp;quot; ::;&amp;quot;:&amp;quot;, -'; 7.; ...:. .&amp;quot; ' .:,L'~n Ai'ts aiid Crafts:s~lgne~iil~e -: :.::'..': &amp;quot; i</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> In this regard, ILEX should be more fruitfully compared with text generation systems such as GOSSIP (Carcagno and Iordanskaja, 1993), PEBA (Milosavljevie, 1997; Milosavljevic, 1999), or POWER (Dale et al., 1998), systems which build an extended text fl'om an underlying database.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> ILEX 3.0 has been developed to be domain independent, to handle relational databases from any domain, as long as the information is provided in the required format. The first two of the systems above are single domain systems. T:he third, POWER, is an extension of PEBA to handle a new domain. It is not clear however whether the resulting system is .. itself domain-dependent or not.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> This last system is perhaps the best comparison for the ILEX system, since it also generates descriptions of museum objects from an underlying database. In that paper, the main focus is on the problem of extracting out usable information from badly structured databases (as often provided by museulns), and on generating texts using only only this information (plus some linguistic knowledge).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> The present paper differs from this approach by assuming that information is already available in a normalised relational database. We observe, as do Dale et al. (1998), that texts generated from this information alone are quite poor in quality. We go one step further by examining what additional information can be provided to improve the quality of the text to a reasonable level.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="10"> The ILEX system has been implemented to be flexible in regards to the available domain information. With a bare minimum, the system provides poor quality texts, but as the domain developer ex.tends-the domain semantics, the quahty of.texts improves, up to a point where users sometimes nfistake ILEX-generated texts for human-authored texts.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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