Narrative support for technical
documents
Formalising Rhetorical Structure Theory
Professor Peter Henderson, Nishadi De Silva
Declarative Systems and Software Engineering Research Group,
School of Electronics and Computer Science,
University of Southampton, UK.
Overview
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Description of the problem
Introduction to narrative theories
Applying narrative theories to improve
technical documents
Features of our software tool, Computer-Aided
Narrative Support (CANS)
Outline for future work
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The problem
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Written communication is unavoidable
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Effective written documents need to be wellstructured and contain a coherent narrative
- Technical writing
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Many theories to enhance a narrative were developed
in the past by linguists and researchers into narratives
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However, existing writing tools do not support
document narratives or incorporate these narrative
theories
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Narratives explained
• What is a narrative?
- A narrative is the…representation of a series of events meaningfully
connected in a temporal and causal way [Onega & Landa, 1996]
- Narrative ≈ Story
• Narrative theories
- Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), 1988
- Simpler than most other theories
- Can be used to enhance coherence, identify (un)necessary segments
of text
• The ‘story’ that a document conveys to the reader
is called a ‘document narrative’
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Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST)
• Divide a piece of text into segments
• A segment is either a nucleus (N) or a satellite (S)
• Relationships exist between these text segments
• Coherence is achieved by the overall effect created by a relation
Example:
• A coherent narrative should form a tree of relationships
(example coming up)
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Applying RST to a short story
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Generic narrative
[There is an initial condition.] 1
[Then a problem arises] 2
[that disrupts this condition.] 3
[A solution is sought. One of the
solutions fixes the problem] 4
[and restores the initial condition.] 5
An instance of the generic narrative
Fido is a happy dog.
Last week Fido got fleas and started scratching.
This made Fido unhappy.
Noticing this, Fido’s owner took him to the vet.
The vet recommended a flea treatment which got
rid of the fleas.
Fido stopped scratching and was happy again!
2 RST tree for the generic narrative
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Another Example:
Generic Narrative for a Research Proposal
[We want you to fund us]1
[because we will achieve these objectives/results.]2 ……………….
[We know this problem is unsolved]7
[because we have studied the background.]8
[We will solve this problem]9
[by this method.]10 ………..
[The research will be carried out by these researchers]16
[and they are the most qualified to do this because justification-of-researchers.]17 ………..
(Generic narrative obtained after studying many suggested formats for Research Proposals from various sources.)
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RST analysis of research proposal narrative
Collapsed RST tree
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CANS: Computer Aided Narrative Support
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Allows a user to create a generic narrative for a document type
and build a RST tree for it
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Questions asked by the tool prompt an author for document
content
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Can explore alternative narratives
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Tool can be used to ‘get story straight’ and create an outline
that best suits the document’s purpose
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Still very simple and needs more work!
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Creating the generic narrative for a document
User enters
the structure
for the
document
here (i.e. the
document
narrative)
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Building the RST tree bottom-up
<hypRelation id=“subtree-A“
type=“Motivation">
<satellite id=“5" />
<nucleus id=“4" />
</hypRelation>
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Questions asked from the user
Questions for
the author.
Each question
preceded with a
history of its
relations to
other segments.
View the
RST tree
or the
document
narrative
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Exploring alternative document narratives
 Often necessary to present the same content in different ways
(i.e. different document narratives)
 Traverse the RST tree in different ways
 Each traversal produces different narratives (some versions not
grammatically sound!)
Nucleus arranged according to relationship
Nucleus first, Satellite second
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Other features
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Web-based
XSLT, JSP, HTML
XML database
RST structures stored using URML (Underspecified
Rhetorical Markup Language)
List of predefined narrative structures provided in tool
- Research Proposal
- Abstract for a paper
- Short Story
List expected to grow…
- A short presentation
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Can create different documents with same content
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Future work
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Collaborative authoring, distributed documents
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Generate questions automatically from RST tree
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More ways to produce alternative narratives
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Develop simplified version of RST more suited to
technical documents
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Incorporate RSTTool, Xindice, other narrative
theories
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Summary
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Document narratives need to be coherent, wellstructured and planned
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Narrative theories can help achieve this
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We have selected Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST)
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CANS makes use of RST to help an author create and
explore document narratives
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Further improvements to this tool and future work
directions were also outlined
Thank you!
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