Structure and Rules in Automated Multimedia Presentation Planning

Abstract

During the planning of multimedia presentations, at least two distinct processes are required: planning the underlying discourse structure (that is, ordering and interrelating the information to be presented) and allocating the media (that is, delimiting the portions to be displayed by each individual medium). The former process has been the topic of several studies in the area of text planning, but numerous questions remain for the latter, including: . What information does the allocation process depend on and what does it produce? How should the two processes be performedsequentially, interleaved, or simultaneously? In this paper, we define Discourse Structure and Presentation Structure and outline the kinds of information that media allocation rules must depend on, including, centrally, information about the discourse structure. We describe a prototype information-to-media planning system, arguing that since media allocation rules depend on the characteristics of the information to be presented, they can only be applied once the overall discourse structure has been essentially planned out and the individual portions of information have become apparent.