ICONOCLAST: Integrating Constraints on Layout and Style

• Constraint satisfaction - We defined the generation of documents as a constraint satisfaction problem. This allows to have full control on the quality of the output documents. We distinguished between hard and soft constraints. Hard constraints always hold and can never be violated whereas soft constraints, typically non-fatal defects of the texts, can be switched on and off and prioritised by users.

  In addition, this framework allows to generate a large number of paraphrases which can be evaluated and ranked (automatically or by the user) according to preferences. This proves a great research tool for evaluating the impact and interaction of various constraints.

• Corpus - A corpus consisting of about 500 Patient Information Leaflets was put online and SGML-annotated with logical structure. We hope to make this electronic corpus soon available to the research community.

• Document planning - We investigated the issue of mapping the rhetorical input onto a text. This was done via the (abstract) document structure, which specifies the segmentation of the message into units such as paragraphs, sentences and lists. This level of representation (i.e., the abstract document structure) has been adoped as a basic data-type in the RAGS project specifications.

• Coherence - Together with the GNOME project, we implemented a constraint-based algorithm based on centering theory. This algorithm allows the text planner to rank the document structures produced according to the centering transitions licensed by the ordering of propositions, giving a high score to the structures that ensure the best coherence and salience.

• Logical complexity - In order to give authors control over the logical scope of their input during knowledge editing, we developed in the WYSIWYM knowledge editor a DRT-based representation in which referents are bound to logical contexts.

We organised the AAAI Fall Symposium on Using Layout for the Generation, Understanding or Retrieval of Documents in November 1999 in Cape Cod, during which researchers with a strong interest on the topic shared their views and experiences. A technical report is available [abstract].

The following pages give more details of the project:

The project's final report (ps format)

An illustrated walkthrough of the system

Interface of the web based demo
(For technical reasons, the full demo is not yet available on the web)

A list of publications

Document structuring module

Nadjet Bouayad-Agha,
Richard Power,
Donia Scott.