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Planning Text for Advisory Dialogues: Capturing Intentional and Rhetorical Information

Paper · 1993 · Johanna D. Moore and Cecile L. Paris

Summary

The paper addresses a gap in explanation generation for advisory dialogue systems: to handle follow-up questions such as "Why?" or "What's call-by-value?", a system must understand what its own earlier explanations were meant to achieve. The authors argue that schema-based generators (McKeown 1985 and successors) capture only rhetorical structure. Speech-act planning (Cohen and Perrault, Appelt) captures intentions but does not scale to coherent multisentential text. They gathered naturally occurring advisory dialogues and used them to motivate a text planner whose plan structure records two things: the speaker's intended effect on the hearer at each step, and the rhetorical relation linking each pair of text spans. Both the system's plans and the user's turns are stored in a dialogue history. The system can then interpret vague follow-ups and avoid repeating a strategy that already failed. For example, it can offer a concrete example after an abstract definition was not understood. The work matters because it shows that a usable discourse model for interactive explanation needs both intentional and rhetorical layers.

Key points

  • Motivating data: three sources of naturally occurring dialogues.
    • Electronic user–operator transcripts (Robinson 1984).
    • Protocols of programmers working with a mock program enhancement advisor.
    • Taped office-hour sessions between first-year CS students and teaching assistants.
  • Running example: a C SWAP procedure. The TA first defines call-by-value abstractly, then switches to a concrete PLUS-ONE example once the student asks again.
  • Critique of schemata: schemata such as McKeown's IDENTIFICATION schema encode typical discourse patterns. However, they lack any representation of the intended effects of their components.
  • Critique of speech-act planning: this approach yields only short texts of one or two sentences. It depends on a detailed hearer model and on first-order logic, where theorem-proving is undecidable in general.
  • Proposed operators: the planner treats rhetorical strategies as compiled knowledge for satisfying intentions. Its plan operators closely resemble Appelt's action summaries, and the resulting plans are kept in the dialogue history for later reasoning.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of PittsburghPittsburgh · United States65 works · 23,401 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 18,614 worksArtificial Intelligence · 17,965 worksArts and Humanities · 17,450 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 17,296 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Dialogue systems · 654 works

Cite

Cite as Johanna D. Moore and Cecile L. Paris. 1993. Planning Text for Advisory Dialogues: Capturing Intentional and Rhetorical Information. Edinburgh Research Explorer (University of Edinburgh).

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{moore1993planning,
  title = {{Planning Text for Advisory Dialogues: Capturing Intentional and Rhetorical Information}},
  author = {Johanna D. Moore and Cecile L. Paris},
  booktitle = {Edinburgh Research Explorer (University of Edinburgh)},
  year = {1993},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/J93-4004/}
}

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