Abstract
Satellite Car Navigation System becomes very popular for car drivers. It provides route plans and route instructions in voice that prevent car drivers from getting lost. However, pedestrians who might want to take bus or MRT cannot enjoy such kind of services. Considering their needs for route advice, we design Route Finding Agent system that provides similar services to the pedestrians. This thesis focuses on the route instruction generation in Route Finding Agent. The environments for Route Finding Agent are different from the one in Car Navigation System. We use complete route description rather than an incremental one to give complete information to users. As to this kind of route description, we analyze from both cognitive and presentation aspects on how to represent the information. According to these analyses, we propose two strategies to select the route information. The first strategy is to select such characteristic as landmarks, cross counts, road names and distances, to describe a route. When landmark is selected as a characteristic, the second strategy is then applied to choose the most appropriate landmark. After selecting the route information, we continue to find various ways to describe a route based on Chinese language syntax. Finally, we generate the route descriptions by using Natural Language Generation.