Introduction

Processing in Ilex consists of a series of transformation from abstractly represented information (in a database) into a final text form (or other presentation). The levels involved in this transformation are:

• Domain Database: domain information represented in files. Information about domain entities, their relations, types, etc.
• Content Potential: the domain information re-represented internal to the Ilex program, in terms of a directed cyclic graph of entities connected by relations.
• Text Structure: when the user requests a description of a domain entity, a page is generated. The first step in this process is to produce an abstract representation of the description, called text structure, consisting of rhetorically related text nodes.
• Syntactic Structure: the leaves of the text structure (text-nodes) are mapped onto a syntactic structures, one step closer to realisation.
• presentational Form: the syntactic structures are mapped onto final presentational forms, which might be a plain-text rendering, HTML, or XML for use in the Festival Speech Synthesis system.

This document will provide more details about the central three levels of these representations: content potential, text structure and syntactic structure.