Lascarides, A. and J. Oberlander, [1992] Abducing Temporal Discourse, in Dale, R., Hovy, E., Rosner, D. and Stock, O. (eds.) Aspects of Automated Natural Language Generation, pp167--182, Springer Verlag.
We focus on the following question: given the causal and temporal relations between events in a knowledge base, what are the ways they can be described in extended text? We argue that we want to be able to generate laconic text, where certain temporal information remains implicit but pragmatically inferrable. An algorithm for generating laconic text is proposed, interleaving abduction and nonmonotonic deduction over a formal model of pragmatic implicature. We demonstrate that the nonmonotonicity ensures that the generation of laconic text is influenced by the preceding linguistic and extra-linguistic context.
@incollection{lascarides:oberlander:1992,
author = {Alex Lascarides and Jon Oberlander},
year = {1992},
title = {Abducing Temporal Discourse},
booktitle = {Aspects of Automated Natural Language Generation},
editor = {R.\ Dale and E.\ Hovy and D.\ Rosner and O.\ Stock},
pages = {167--182},
publisher = {Springer Verlag}
}