Narrative Support for Technical Documents: Formalising Rhetorical Structure Theory

: Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) is an area that requires a lot of technical documents and an important feature of a well-written document is a coherent narrative. Even though computer software has helped authors in many other aspects of writing, support for document narratives is almost non-existent. Therefore, we introduce CANS (Computer-Aided Narrative Support), a tool that uses Rhetorical Structure Theory to enhance the narrative of a document. From this narrative, the tool generates questions to prompt the author for the content of the document. CANS also allows the author to explore alternative narratives for a document. A catalogue of predefined narrative structures for popular types of documents is provided too. Our tool is still in its rudimentary stages but sufficiently complete to be demonstrated.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ICEIS
• Authors: Nishadi De Silva, Peter Henderson
• Keywords: Coherent Narrative, Computer-Aided Narrative Support, Documents, ICEIS 2005, Information Systems