A Framework for Customizable Generation of Hypertext Presentations

A Framework for Customizable Generation of Hypertext Presentations Benoit Lavoie and Owen Rainbow CoOenTex, Inc. 840 Hanshaw Road, Ithaca, NY 14850, USA benoit, owen@cogentex, com Abstract In this paper, we present a framework, PRE- SENTOR, for the development and customiza- tion of hypertext presentation generators. PRE- SENTOR offers intuitive and powerful declarative languages specifying the presentation at differ- ent levels: macro-planning, micro-planning, re- alization, and formatting. PRESENTOR is im- plemented and is portable cross-platform and cross-domain. It has been used with success in several application domains including weather forecasting~ object modeling, system descrip- tion and requirements summarization. 1 Introduction Presenting information through text and hyper- text has become a major area of research and development. Complex systems must often deal with a rapidly growing amount of information. In this context, there is a need for presenta- tion techniques facilitating a rapid development and customization of the presentations accord- ing to particular standards or preferences. Typ- ically, the overall task of generating a presen- tation is decomposed into several subtasks in- eluding: macro-planning or text planning (de- termining output content and structure), micro- planning or sentence planning (determining ab- stract target language resources to express con- tent, such as lexieal items and syntactic con- structions and aggregating the representations), realization (producing the text string) and/or- matting (determining the formatting marks to insert in the text string). Developing an appli- cation to present the information for a given domain is often a time-consuming operation requiring the implementation from scratch of domain communication knowledge (Kittredge et al., 1991) required for the different genera- tion subtasks. In this technical note and demo we present a new presentation framework, PRE- SENTOR, whose main purpose is to facilitate the development of presentation applications. PRE- SENTOR has been used with success in differ- ent domains including object model description (Lavoie et al., 1997), weather forecasting (Kit- tredge and Lavoie, 1998) and system require- ments summarization (Ehrhart et al., 1998; Barzilay et al., 1998). PRESENTOR has the following characteristics, which we believe are unique in this combination: • PRESENTOR modules are implemented in Java and C++. It is therefore easily portable cross-platform. • PRESENTOR modules use declarative knowl- edge interpreted at run-time which can be cus- tomized by non-programmers without changing the modules. • PRESENTOR uses rich presentation plans (or exemplars) (Rainbow et al., 1998) which can be used to specify the presentation at different lev- els of abstraction (rhetorical, conceptual, syn- tactic, and surface form) and which can be used for deep or shallow generation. In Section 2, we describe the overall architec- ture of PRESENTOR. In Section 3 to Section 6, we present the different specifications used to define domain communication knowledge and linguistic knowledge. Finally, in Section 7, we describe the outlook for PRESENTOR. 2 PRESENTOR Architecture The architecture of PRESENTOR illustrated in Figure 1 consists of a core generator with sev- eral associated knowledge bases. The core gen- erator has a pipeline architecture which is sim- ilar to many existing systems (Reiter, 1994): an …

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