---
title: "The Role of Saliency in Generating Natural Language Arguments"
authors:
  - "Chris Reed"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1999/125"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1999/0125.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Sixteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 1999
pages: "876-882"
track: "Natural Language Processing"
keywords:
---

# The Role of Saliency in Generating Natural Language Arguments

Chris Reed

*Proceedings of the Sixteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 876-882.

## Abstract

Generating expressions which communicate information already known to the hearer, building enthymematic arguments, and characterising refutations all pose significant problems to traditional natural language generation techniques. After exploring these problems, an approach is proposed which through its employment of a notion of saliency handles them cleanly, and offers support for further features including clue word generation. It is argued that propositional salience and its interaction with intentional, attentional, epistemic and structural components of a text generation system have a key role to play in the design and realisation of persuasive text.