Narrative Generation from Extracted Associations

                             Pierre-Luc Vaudry and Guy Lapalme

                          Université de Montréal, Montréal, Canada
                       {vaudrypl,lapalme}@iro.umontreal.ca

          Keywords. Narrative. Natural Language Generation. Association rule discov-
          ery. Activity of Daily Living. Data-to-text. Rhetorical relations. Coherence.


  In [1], we study how causal relations may be used to improve narrative generation
  from real-life temporal data. We describe a method for extracting potential causal
  relations from temporal data and for structuring a generated report. The method is
  applied to the generation of reports highlighting unusual combinations of events in the
  Activity of Daily Living (ADL) domain.
     Our experiment applies association rules discovery techniques in [2] for selecting
  candidate associations based on three properties: frequency, confidence and signifi-
  cance. We assume that temporal proximity and temporal precedence are indicators of
  potential causality.
     The generation of a report from the ADL data for a given period follows a pipeline
  architecture. The first stage is data interpretation, which consists of finding instances
  of the previously selected association rules in the input. For each of those, one or
  more semantic relations are introduced as part of a hypothetic interpretation of the
  input data. Next those relations are used to plan the document as a whole in the doc-
  ument planning stage. The output is a rhetorical structure which is then pruned to
  keep only the most important events and relations. Follows a microplanning stage that
  plans the phrases and lexical units expressing the events and rhetorical relations. This
  produces a lexico-syntactic specification that is realised as natural language text in the
  last stage: surface realisation.
     After analysing the results, the extracted relations seem to be useful to locally link
  activities with explicit rhetorical relations. However, further work is needed to better
  exploit them for improving coherence at the global level.


  References
  1.   Vaudry, P.-L., Lapalme, G.: Narrative Generation from Extracted Associations.
       In: Proceedings of the 15th European Workshop on Natural Language Genera-
       tion., Brighton, United Kingdom (Sept 2015).
  2.   Hamalainen, W., Nykanen, M.: Efficient Discovery of Statistically Significant
       Association Rules. In: ICDM ’08 Proceedings of the Eighth IEEE International
       Conference on Data Mining. pp. 203–212 (2008).




In: P. Cellier, T. Charnois, A. Hotho, S. Matwin, M.-F. Moens, Y. Toussaint (Eds.): Proceedings of
DMNLP, Workshop at ECML/PKDD, Nancy, France, 2014.
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