In a language generation system, a content planner embodies one or more “plans” that are usually hand–crafted, sometimes through manual analysis of target text. In this paper, we present a system that we developed to automatically learn elements of a plan and the ordering constraints among them. As training data, we use semantically annotated transcripts of domain experts performing the task our system is designed to mimic. Given the large degree of variation in the spoken language of the transcripts, we developed a novel algorithm to find parallels between transcripts based on techniques used in computational genomics. .
