The task here is modelling
the reworking of a text to satisfy
some combination of constraints. For example, you've written a paper
that you want to submit to a conference; but you have to cut it
down by a page, and at the same time have it conform to your house style's
readability guidelines (as well as, say, wanting to achieve specific lexical density
and sentential variation goals).
This raises a number of subproblems:
- how to represent the rewritings in a computational framework;
- how to represent the changes a rewriting will make;
- what effects the rewritings will have on the text: whether they
are neutral with respect to the text's propositional meaning, or whether
they will alter it;
- how multiple constraints interact;
- how an appropriate set of rewritings is chosen so that the
constraints are satisfied;
- how to minimise the effects on the text given constraint
satisfaction;
- given a mathematical model that thus optimises the choice of rewritings,
what can be said about particular texts on which it operates (in terms
of perturbability, "elasticity", etc) and about the model itself; and
- how it will all fit together in a computational system.
This work draws on mathematical optimisation theory to describe
objectives and constraints and produce the minimally changed text.
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Last updated 9 April 2001