Narrative support for technical documents Formalising Rhetorical Structure Theory Professor Peter Henderson, Nishadi De Silva Declarative Systems and Software.

Narrative support for technical documents

Formalising Rhetorical Structure Theory

Professor Peter Henderson, Nishadi De Silva

Declarative Systems and Software Engineering Research Group,School of Electronics and Computer Science,

University of Southampton, UK.

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Overview

Description of the problem Introduction to narrative theories Applying narrative theories to improve

technical documents Features of our software tool, Computer-Aided

Narrative Support (CANS) Outline for future work

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The problem Written communication is unavoidable

Effective written documents need to be well-structured and contain a coherent narrative

- Technical writing

Many theories to enhance a narrative were developed in the past by linguists and researchers into narratives

However, existing writing tools do not support document narratives or incorporate these narrative theories

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Narratives explained

• What is a narrative?- A narrative is the…representation of a series of events

meaningfully connected in a temporal and causal way [Onega & Landa, 1996]- Narrative ≈ Story

• Narrative theories- Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), 1988- Simpler than most other theories- Can be used to enhance coherence, identify (un)necessary

segments of text

• The ‘story’ that a document conveys to the reader is called a ‘document narrative’

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Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST)

• Divide a piece of text into segments

• A segment is either a nucleus (N) or a satellite (S)

• Relationships exist between these text segments

• Coherence is achieved by the overall effect created by a relation

• A coherent narrative should form a tree of relationships (example coming up)

Example:

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Applying RST to a short story

[There is an initial condition.] 1

[Then a problem arises] 2 [that disrupts this condition.] 3

[A solution is sought. One of thesolutions fixes the problem] 4

[and restores the initial condition.] 5

Fido is a happy dog.Last week Fido got fleas and started scratching. This made Fido unhappy.Noticing this, Fido’s owner took him to the vet.The vet recommended a flea treatment which got rid of the fleas. Fido stopped scratching and was happy again!

Generic narrative An instance of the generic narrative

RST tree for the generic narrative

1

2

3

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Another Example: Generic Narrative for a Research Proposal

[We want you to fund us]1

[because we will achieve these objectives/results.]2 ……………….

[We know this problem is unsolved]7

[because we have studied the background.]8

[We will solve this problem]9

[by this method.]10 ………..

[The research will be carried out by these researchers]16

[and they are the most qualified to do this because justification-of-researchers.]17 ………..

(Generic narrative obtained after studying many suggested formats for Research Proposals from various sources.)

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RST analysis of research proposal narrative

Collapsed RST tree

We want you to fund us

2-19

Motivation

because we will achieve these objectives/results

3-19

Evidence

9-12

10-12

Evidence

by this method 11-12

Elaboration

16-19

ElaborationSolutionhood

13-15

Condition

We will need total-time

Sequence14-15

SequenceWe will solve this problem

3-8

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CANS: Computer Aided Narrative Support

Allows a user to create a generic narrative for a document type and build a RST tree for it

Questions asked by the tool prompt an author for document content

Can explore alternative narratives

Tool can be used to ‘get story straight’ and create an outline that best suits the document’s purpose

Still very simple and needs more work!

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Creating the generic narrative for a document

User enters the structure

for the document

here (i.e. the document narrative)

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Building the RST tree bottom-up

<hypRelation id=“subtree-A“ type=“Motivation">  <satellite id=“5" />   <nucleus id=“4" /> </hypRelation>

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Questions asked from the user

View the RST tree

or the document narrative

Questions for the author.

Each question preceded with a

history of its relations to

other segments.

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Exploring alternative document narratives Often necessary to present the same content in different ways

(i.e. different document narratives)

Traverse the RST tree in different ways

Each traversal produces different narratives (some versions not grammatically sound!)

Nucleus arranged according to relationship Nucleus first, Satellite second

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Other features

Web-based XSLT, JSP, HTML XML database RST structures stored using URML (Underspecified

Rhetorical Markup Language) List of predefined narrative structures provided in tool

- Research Proposal

- Abstract for a paper

- Short Story

- A short presentation

Can create different documents with same content

List expected to grow…

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Future work

Collaborative authoring, distributed documents

Generate questions automatically from RST tree

More ways to produce alternative narratives

Develop simplified version of RST more suited to technical documents

Incorporate RSTTool, Xindice, other narrative theories

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Summary Document narratives need to be coherent, well-

structured and planned

Narrative theories can help achieve this

We have selected Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST)

CANS makes use of RST to help an author create and explore document narratives

Further improvements to this tool and future work directions were also outlined

Thank you!