A Three-Step Procedure for Language Generation.
Abstract
This paper outlines a three-step plan for generation English text from any sematic representation by applying a set of syntactic transformations to a collection of kernel sentences. The paper focuses on describing a program which realizes the third step of this plan. Step One separates the given representation into groups and generates from each group a set of kernel sentences. Step Two must decide, based upon both syntactic and thematic consideration, the set of transformations that shoulld be performed upon each set of kernels. The output of the first two steps provides the 'TASK' for Step Three. Each element of the TASK corresponds to the generation of one English sentence, and in turn may be defined as a triple consisting of: a list of kernel phrase markers; a list of transformations to be performed upon the list of kernals; a 'syntactic separator' to separate or connect generated sentences. Step Three takes as input the results of Step One and Step Two. The program which implements Step Three 'reads' the TASK, executes the transformations indicated there, combines the altered kernels of each set into a sentence, performs a pronominalization process, and finally produces the appropriate English word string. This approach subdivides a hard problem into three more manageable and relatively independent pieces.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Dec 01, 1980
- Accession Number
- ADA131537
Entities
People
- Boris Katz
Organizations
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology