An example of hierarchical planning…

(2) planning a sequence of communicative rhetorical actions

Johanna Moore & Cécile Paris (1993) “Planning text for advisory dialogues: capturing intentional and rhetorical information”. Computational Linguistics 19(4):651-694

Discourse Structure: RST

• It is a hierarchical goal decomposition

• It organises the content to be presented

• It includes an explicit representation of coherence relationships

• It has been shown to be useful to generate texts, multimedia presentations, and to provide a context in which to understand a follow-up interaction.

Cécile Paris (CSIRO, Australia)

A plan operator’s role during the planning process

PLAN OPERATOR

effect

preconditions

body

Using planning operators for rhetorical planning

PLAN OPERATOR

effect

preconditions

body

communicative intention

constraints

nucleus satellites

Extending the planning operators to represent rhetorical structure

Name Executive-Briefing-Summary

Effect (KnowAbout User ?summary)

Constraints And (mode verbose) (user.type == ?user)

Nucleus (KnowAbout User ?topic)

Satellites RST-Elaboration (KnowAbout User ?add-topic)

Cécile Paris (CSIRO, Australia)

I.e., in order to have the effect of the ‘user’ knowing about some material (the summary) we can decompose the communicative actions into a nucleus, where the user is informed about the topic and a further elaboration where more topics or added. This is only applicable if we have a particular type of user and we are being ‘verbose’.

More detailed example: Persuading the reader/hearer to do something

motivation

motivationmotivation

An RST structure

Persuading the reader/hearer to do something

motivation

motivationmotivation

An RST structure

A plan representation EFFECT: (persuaded ?hearer (DO ?hearer ?act))CONSTRAINTS: (?goal is a step towards ?act)NUCLEUS: (forall ?goal (MOTIVATION ?act ?goal)) Adapted from

Moore & Paris (1993)

?act ?goal ?goal ?goal

?act ?goal ?goal ?goal

Motivating the reader/hearer to do something

motivation

An RST structure

A plan representation EFFECT: (MOTIVATION ?act ?goal)CONSTRAINTS: (?goal is a step towards ?act)NUCLEUS: (BELieve ?hearer (STEP ?act ?goal))Adapted from

Moore & Paris (1993)

?goal ?act

Making the reader/hearer believe something

A plan representation EFFECT: (MOTIVATION ?act ?goal)CONSTRAINTS: (?goal is a step towards ?act)NUCLEUS: (BELieve ?hearer (STEP ?act ?goal))

(s / … :speechact assertion… )

An SPL representation

An illocutionary act (inform ?hearer ?proposition)

a primitive action

The actual definitions given by Moore & Paris (1993)

The actual definitions given by Moore & Paris (1993)

The actual definitions given by Moore & Paris (1993)

Primitive communicative acts

(s / … :speechact assertion… )

An SPL representation

An illocutionary act (inform ?hearer ?proposition)

a primitive action

EFFECT: (BELieve ?hearer ?propositionCONSTRAINTS: nilNUCLEUS: (generate (s / proposition …))

Plans…

• … contain primitive communicative acts at their ‘leaves’

• primitive acts can be directed ‘executed’ (i.e., carried out) by other components of the computational system

• … can be used for informing in other modalities apart from language

• … and can be applied across languages…