Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous studies on text generation and revision seldom consider emotions and social relations as motivations for linguistic variations such as word choice and syntactic structure arrangement. This paper proposes a computational model that uses four attributes affect, activity, power, and emphasis to revise texts. These attributes express ideological beliefs, the connotations of lexical items, and connotation propagation properties of sentence structures. With these formal tools, an algorithm of backward chaining revises sentences with sensible choices of word and sentence structures. The model provides a basis for future research that can lead to a fully automated text revision system.