Using Discourse Focus, Temporal Focus, and Spatial Focus to Generate Multisentential Text.

This paper claims that reliance on discourse focus to guide the production of rhetorically structured texts is insufficient over lengthier stretches of prose. Instead, this paper argues that at least three distinct attentional constraints are required: discourse focus [Sidner, 1979, 1983; Grosz and Sidner, 1986], temporal focus [Webber, 1988], and a novel notion of spatial focus. The paper illustrates the operation of this tripartite theory of focus in a computational system (TEXPLAN) that plans multisentential text.