Automatic Generation of Multimodal Weather Reports from Datasets

Automatic Generation of Multimodal Weather Reports from Datasets Stephan M. Kerpedjiev* Institute of Mathematics B1.8, Acad. G. Bonchev Street 1113 Sofia, Bulgaria Abstract Weather reports are created in various modes -- natural language text, specialized language text, tables and maps. The system presented allows the user to define his needs of weather information and requirements on the form of presentation. The system analyzes a dataset obtained through spe- cific procedures of forecasting or observation, plans the product according to the user requirements and generates its components. Special emphasis is placed on the coherence of the report by investigat- ing the rhetorical structures observed in this kind of text and the coordination between a map and a text specifying it. The method of generation is a knowledge-based one with three types of knowledge employed in the system - terminological, rhetori- cal and grammatical. A prototype has been imple- mented and tested with original datasets. 1 Introduction The generation of information products stepped into a new phase characterized by the intensive application of artificial intelligence, computational linguistics and other modern information technologies. Currently, var- ious data are collected into databases and specific pro- cedures are applied for processing those data into fore- casts, analyses, surveys and other types of information products. Usually, those products are in numerical form which is unsuitable for the general audience and even for many specialists. Therefore this data has to be con- verted into a human-oriented mode such as natural lan- guage (NL) text, tables, maps, diagrams. The automatic conversion requires formalizing the process -- a problem which nowadays cannot be attacked successfully except by gathering, coupling and employing various types of knowledge -- common sense, about the subject domain, grammatical, etc. In this paper, we report on a study of the automatic generation of multimodal weather reports from observed or predicted data. This particular problem is significant both from a practical point of view (various weather re- ports are to be made every day in many weather cen- ters all over the world) and for its scientific aspects (it manifests the basic features of the generation of verbal *This work has been partially supported by the Ministry of Education and Science and the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. reports from data). Our work relates closely to three ar- eas: NL generation, multimodal documents and weather information processing. The communicative act performed by the system is the description of an observed or predicted situation. Other works that consider analogous communicative acts are (Davey, 1979) on the description of tic-tac-toe games, (Kukieh, 1983) on the generation of market reports, (Andr~ el al., 1988) about simultaneous commenting on a soccer game recorded as a sequence of digitized video frames. In our case the situation to be presented is coded into a dataset obtained through routine procedures of weather forecasting or observing. Our approach to NL generation follows the basic steps as described by McDonald (1987), viz. selection of the content portions that are to be communicated to the user, planning …

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