Generating peripheral rhetorical devices by consulting a user model

In the process of generating text, competent speakers take into consideration the effect their utterances are likely to have on their listeners. In particular, they try to anticipate and prevent possible comprehension problems. In this paper, we propose a mechanism which emulates this behaviour for the generation of Peripheral Rhetorical Devices,. such as Motivations, Contradictions and Revisions. Our mechanism anticipates the effect of a given message on a model of a listener's beliefs, and proposes these rhetorical devices to preclude possible adverse effects. As a testbed for these ideas, a discourse planner called WISHFUL is being implemented in the domain of high-school algebra.