Intentional Structures of Documents

Saïd TAZI

LIHS - Université Toulouse 1

Fabrice EVRARD

IRIT - ENSEEIHT

&

Tazi@cict.fr

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Objective

Present what is the notion of intentional structures of documents

Demonstrate how it could be modeled in terms of speech act theory

Show how it could be taken in word processor.

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Overview

Intentional Structures Writing Questions Acts and meta-acts Implementation issues

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Intentional StructuresIntroduceDefine

Explain

InsistArgument

Conclude

Argument

Demonstrate

Introduce

Explain

Illustrate

Acknowledge

Quote

Refer_to

Enumerate

List

Title

Underline

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•Who is the addressee ?•What does the author want to say by writing this? •What does he want to achieve by writing that?•Why does he want to do (or say) it?•How does he formulate the statement?•Why do it in this way rather than in another one?

Writing Questions

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Acts of writing An act is an action that could affect the

reader or the document Two kinds of act of writing :

Domain acts and Meta acts Domain acts are verbs that explicit the

effect the author want to have on his readers

Inform, Do, Explain, etc. Meta-acts are verbs that express what we

do while writing To Bold, Underline, to Divide, to Columns,

etc.

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Model of IntentionIntention(Agent1, Agent2, Action, Goal, Means,

Reason) Agent1 is the author of the action. It might be the writer, or

a reader in the case of revision, or annotation; Agent2 is the agent for who the action is intended,

generally it is the reader; Action is an act which expresses what the author

of the intention wants to carry out; Goal is an act which expresses what the author wants to

do by performing the action; Means is an act which expresses the type of action

achieved on the text; it is a meta act ; Reason is an act which expresses why the author

carries out the action.

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Sample

Intention(Writer, Reader,

To_Cite(Writer, Author, Citation-text),

To_Document(Writer,Writer-text, Citation-Text),

To_Quote(Writer, Citation-text),

Convince(Writer, Reader, Writer-text))

Agent1, Agent2

Action

Goal

Means

Reason

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Implementation issues By responding to the Writing questions,

authors must be aware about what they are doing

Consider new commands that let the user explicit his intentions while writing,

the system adds xml tags that allow the storage and the processing of intentional structures.

A Mockup is implemented under MS-Word, with VBA

The system is under implementation, in Java, in the domain of authoring course support.

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Sample