While there are quite restricted directions that the conversation can take, each party can take the initiative in pursuing a direction. The system has all the information, and has the goal of getting across some basic messages about the content of the gallery. This item, quite unusually, is made from paper. Our point of departure has been to gather transcripts of real guided tours, in collaboration with the National Museums of Scotland. Figure 1 shows an extract from one such interview.
V is the visitor, and G is the guide.
ILEX-0 is still far from generating discourse of the sophistication shown by a real museum curator. But it should be clear that any hypertext system designed to simulate such discourse must make use of a dynamic generation component of some sort. In the following section, we consider the kinds of flexibility which this component should ideally provide.