Co-generation of text and graphics

To reduce potential discrepancies between textual and graphical content in documentation, it is possible to produce both text and graphics from a single common source. One approach to co-generation of text and graphics uses a single logical specification; a second approach starts with CAD-based representation and produces a corresponding textual account. This paper explores these two different approaches, reports the results of using prototypes embodying the approaches to represent simple figures, and discusses issues that were identified through use of the prototypes. While it appears feasible to co-generate text and graphics automatically, the process raises deep issues of design of communications, including the intent of the producer of the documentation

Towards automatic generation of multimodal answers to medical questions: a cognitive engineering approach

This paper describes a production experiment carried out to determine which modalities people choose to answer different types of questions. In this experiment participants had to create (multimodal) presentations of answers to general medical questions. The collected answer presentations were coded on types of manipulations (typographic, spatial, graphical), presence of visual media (i.e., photos, graphics, and animations), functions and position of these visual media. The results of a first analysis indicated that participants presented the information in a multimodal way. Moreover, significant differences were found in the information presentation of different answer and question types

LevelScheme: A level scheme drawing and scientific figure preparation system for Mathematica

LevelScheme is a scientific figure preparation system for Mathematica. The main emphasis is upon the construction of level schemes, or level energy diagrams, as used in nuclear, atomic, molecular, and hadronic physics. LevelScheme also provides a general infrastructure for the preparation of publication-quality figures, including support for multipanel and inset plotting, customizable tick mark generation, and various drawing and labeling tasks. Coupled with Mathematica's plotting functions and powerful programming language, LevelScheme provides a flexible system for the creation of figures combining diagrams, mathematical plots, and data plots.Comment: LaTeX (RevTeX), 10 pages, associated files available from http://wnsl.physics.yale.edu/levelschem

Desiderata for an Every Citizen Interface to the National Information Infrastructure: Challenges for NLP

In this paper, I provide desiderata for an interface that would enable ordinary people to properly access the capabilities of the NII. I identify some of the technologies that will be needed to achieve these desiderata, and discuss current and future research directions that could lead to the development of such technologies. In particular, I focus on the ways in which theory and techniques from natural language processing could contribute to future interfaces to the NII. Introduction The evolving national information infrastructure (NII) has made available a vast array of on-line services and networked information resources in a variety of forms (text, speech, graphics, images, video). At the same time, advances in computing and telecommunications technology have made it possible for an increasing number of households to own (or lease or use) powerful personal computers that are connected to this resource. Accompanying this progress is the expectation that people will be able to more..

On the Role of Visuals in Multimodal Answers to Medical Questions

This paper describes two experiments carried out in order to investigate the role of visuals in multimodal answer presentations for a medical question answering system. First, a production experiment was carried out to determine which modalities people choose to answer different types of questions. In this experiment, participants had to create (multimodal) presentations of answers to general medical questions. The collected answer presentations were coded on the presence of visual media (i.e., photos, graphics, and animations) and their function. The results indicated that participants presented the information in a multimodal way. Moreover, significant differences were found in the presentation of different answer and question types. Next, an evaluation experiment was conducted to investigate how users evaluate different types of multimodal answer presentations. In this second experiment, participants had\ud to assess the informativity and attractiveness of answer presentations for different types of medical questions. These answer presentations, originating from the production experiment, were manipulated in their answer length (brief vs. extended) and their type of picture (illustrative vs. informative). After the participants had assessed the answer presentations, they received a post-\ud test in which they had to indicate how much they had recalled from the presented answer presentations. The results showed that answer presentations with an informative picture were evaluated as more informative and more attractive than answer presentations with an illustrative picture. The results for the post-test tentatively indicated that learning from answer presentations with an informative picture leads to a better learning performance than learning from purely textual answer presentations

Visualising Discourse Structure in Interactive Documents

In this paper we introduce a method for generating interactive documents which exploits the visual features of hypertext to represent discourse structure. We explore the consistent and principled use of graphics and animation to support navigation and comprehension of non-linear text, where textual discourse markers do not always work effectively