Composition method of presentation slides using diagrammatic representation of discourse structure

Abstract

This paper presents a method of generating presentation slides automatically from the discourse structure of a presentation. The discourse structure represents semantic relationships among slide components such as texts and images. Although most of the slides generated by conventional methods follow the standard format of bullet lists, our method attempts to generate slides with diagrammatic representation. Our idea is to find the layout templates that are appropriate to express the discourse structure specified by presenters. To achieve this, we introduce the logical structure of slides. The logical structure represents sequential and inclusive relations among the slide components and is used as the precondition of a template. We represent the preconditions for applying a layout template as the logical structure. By comparing the preconditions and the logical structure constructed from the discourse structure, appropriate templates can be applied. Through the case study, we confirmed that our prototype system can generate the slides with diagrammatic representation from a given discourse structure.