Oberlander, J. and A. Lascarides, [1991] Discourse Generation, Temporal Constraints and Defeasible Reasoning, in Proceedings of the AAAI Fall Symposium on Discourse Structure in Interpretation and Generation, Asilomar, California, November 1991.
Given the causal and temporal relations between events in a knowledge base, what are the ways they can be described in text?
Elsewhere, we have argued that defeasible reasoning underlies the hearer's temporal interpretation of text. Here, we argue, on the basis of the kind of temporal information that remains implicit in candidate utterances, that if the speaker is to tailor text to the hearer, then defeasible reasoning must be integrated into the generation process. We suggest two ways in which this can be done: a version of Hobbs et al's [1988, 1990] Generation as Abduction, and the Interactive Defaults Strategy introduced by Joshi et al [1984, 1986]. Assuming the Interactive Defaults strategy, the basic goal is to determine how notions of temporal reliability, precision and coherence can be used by a nonmonotonic logic to constrain the space of possible utterances. We explore a defeasible reasoning framework in which the interactions between the relative knowledge bases of speakers and hearers helps do this. Finally, we briefly discuss an objection to the programme as outlined, considering whether discourse structure has been marginalised.
@inproceedings{oberlander:lascarides:1992,
author = {Jon Oberlander and Alex Lascarides},
year = {1991},
title = {Discourse Generation, Temporal Constraints and Defeasible Reasoning},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the AAAI Fall Symposium on Discourse Structure in Interpretation and Generation},
\address = {Asilomar, California}
}