User Modeling and Register Theory: A Congruence of Concerns
Abstract
Sophisticated computer systems using natural language to interact with people are now becoming widespread. These systems need to communicate with an increasingly varied user community, across an ever more extensive range of situations. Just as for human-human interaction, no single style of generated text is adequate across all user types and all situations. Generation systems can only be effective if they appropriately 'taylor' their phrasing, text content, and organization according to the situation and to the abilities and requirements of the intended readers. This paper presents new work in 'tailoring' that addresses the phrasing problem: how to best express the propositional content that has been chosen by a text planner, given a user and situation. Importantly, this paper shows how relevant linguistic studies can be bought to bear the problem of user modeling and tailoring. In particular, we would like to show that the concerns of register theory are very close to some of the concerns of user modeling, and that aspects of the theory can guide us in studies in user modeling. Based on this specific linguistic theory, we propose a methodology to systematically study the problem of tailoring phrasing. Tailoring, User modeling, Register theory, Generation systems.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Nov 01, 1990
- Accession Number
- ADA269676
Entities
People
- Cecile L. Paris
- John A . Bateman
Organizations
- University of Southern California