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The Methodius Corpus of Rhetorical Discourse Structures and Generated Texts

Using the Methodius Natural Language Generation (NLG) System, we have created a corpus which consists of a collection of generated texts which describe ancient Greek artefacts. Each text is linked to two representations created as part of the NLG process. The first is a content plan, which uses rhetorical relations to describe the high-level discourse structure of the text, and the second is a logical form describing the syntactic structure, which is sent to the OpenCCG surface realization module to produce the final text output. In recent work, White and Howcroft (2015) have used the SPaRKy restaurant corpus, which contains similar combination of texts and representations, for their research on the induction of rules for the combination of clauses. In the first instance this corpus will be used to test their algorithms on an additional domain, and extend their work to include the learning of referring expression generation rules. As far as we know, the SPaRKy restaurant corpus is the only existing corpus of this type, and we hope that the creation of this new corpus in a different domain will provide a useful resource to the Natural Language Generation community.