Generating Visual Arguments: a Media-independent Approach

... In this paper, we take the position that certain types of arguments that can be presented visually in information graphics (e.g., bar charts and scatter plots) can be generated from an underlying media-independent representation of a presentation. In support of this claim, first we briefly describe the architecture we are developing for the generation of integrated text and information graphics presentations. In this architecture, mediaindependent communicative acts are transformed into user task specifications which are the basis for the automatic design of the presentation's graphics. Then we present an example showing correspondences between the media-independent representation of an argument and the tasks that would be used to design a graphic expressing the argument

Saying It in Graphics: From Intentions to Visualizations

We propose a methodology for automatically realizing communicative goals in graphics. It features a task model that mediates the communicative intent and the selection of graphical techniques. The methodology supports the following functions: isolating assertions presentable in graphics; mapping such assertions into tasks for the potential reader, and selecting graphical techniques that support those tasks. We illustrate the methodology by redesigning a textual argument into a multimedia one with the same rhetorical and content structures but employing graphics to achieve some of the intentions. 1

Model-Driven Hypermedia Access to Weather Information

: A framework is presented for hypermedia access to weather information originating from gridded data sets. The information is presented on different media (map, text, graph, table, image), depending on what aspect is emphasized. The user navigates by selecting an element that is already displayed, and a new product is generated that provides additional details about the selected element. The contents of a product is represented by a description, which is an organized chunk of assertions. Each assertion provides a single weather characteristic to a given region and time period. Three knowledge bases (weather, territory, and time models) define the objects participating in the assertions and drive the generation. Keywords: hypermedia, domain modeling, media modeling, assertional systems, applications 1. Introduction We are in the era of numerical weather analysis and forecasting. Advanced data sets are generated with high temporal and spatial resolution. However, these data sets canno..

Generation of Informative Texts with Style

An approach to the computational treatment of style is presented in the case of generation of informative texts. We regard the style moztly as a means of controlled selection of lternatives faced at each level of text generation. The generation technique, as we]] as the style specification, are considered at four levels -- content production, discourse generation surface structure development, and lexical choice. A style is specified by the frequency of occurrence of certain features examined through observation of particular texts. The algorithm for text generation ensures efficient treatment of the style requirements