A Principled Representation of Attributive Descriptions for Integrated Text and Information Graphics Presentations

Abstract

This paper describes a media-independent, compositional, plan-based approach to representing attributive descriptions for use in integrated text and graphics generation. An attributive description's main function is to convey information directly contributing to the communicative goals of a discourse, whereas a referential description's onlyfunction is to enable the audience to identify a particular referent. This approach has been implemented as part of an architecture for generating integrated text and information graphics. Uses of referential and attributive descriptions are represented as two distinct types of communicative acts in a media-independent plan. It is particularly important to distinguish the two types of acts, since they have different consequences for dialogue and text generation, and for graphic design.