Abstract
Genre, like layout, is an important factor in effective communication, and automated tools which assist in genre compliance are thus of considerable value. Genres are reusable meta-structures, which exist independently of specific documents. This paper focuses on that part of the document production process which involves genre, and discusses a specific example in order to present the design rationale of mechanisms which assist in producing documents compliant with specific genre rules. The mechanisms we have developed are based on automated incremental, iterative transformations, which convert a draft document elaborated by the author into a genre compliant final document. The approach mimics the manner in which a human expert would transform the document. Transformation rules constitute a reusable and constructive expression of certain aspects of genre. The rules identify situations which appear inappropriate for the genre in question, and propose corrective action, so that the document becomes increasingly more compliant with the genre in question. This process of genre conformance iterates until no further corrective action is possible. This mechanism has been fully implemented. The implementation comprises both a work environment and a rule based language. The implementation relies internally on a general purpose tree transformation engine designed originally for use in natural language processing applications, which we have adapted to handle XML documents.