1983 Reports

Recursion in Text and Its Use in Language Generation

McKeown, Kathleen

In this paper, I show how textual structure is recursive in nature: that is, the same rhetorical strategies that are available to constructing the text's macro-structure are available for constructing its sub-sequences as well, resulting in a hierarchically structured text. The recursive formalism presented can be used by a generation system to vary the amount of detail it presents for the same discourse goal in different situations.