Sentence Ordering in Electronic Navigational Chart Companion Text Generation

We present the sentence ordering part of a natural language generation module, used in the framework of a knowledge base of electronic navigation charts and sailing directions. Sentence ordering is done via the extraction of frequent ``interesting patterns''. The particularity of the knowledge base is that it is based on a controlled hybrid language, that is the combination of a controlled natural language and a controlled visual language. Thanks to the language's hybrid nature, the sentence ordering process is able to take into account hybrid (textual and visual) information, involving cartographic data, as well as landscape "read" by the navigator.