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Some apparently disjoint aims and requirements for grammar development environments” the case of natural language generation

Summary

The paper examines why grammar development environments (GDEs) for natural language analysis and for generation have developed almost independently. Popular platforms such as ALEP are oriented towards analysis and the HPSG/LFG formalisms, and in them generation is treated only as a way of testing the grammar. As a result, projects that generate coherent texts make practically no use of such tools. The author classifies generation systems by the size of the unit they produce and by their approach. He then shows that successful generation grammars are distinguished by their orientation towards communicative function. This orientation is realized most fully in the paradigmatic organization of systemic-functional linguistics (SFL). In such a grammar, almost the entire description is contained in a type lattice, and generation reduces to traversing it. Using the KPML environment as an example, the author shows how this organization of resources supports convenient debugging, multilinguality and distributed development of large grammars. In conclusion, he raises the question of whether these techniques could also prove useful for analysis-oriented environments.

Key points

  • The author identifies three main environments for practical text generation: FUF (Elhadad), KPML/Penman and the CoGenTex generators built on the Meaning–Text model. Analysis-oriented GDEs are appropriate only for the few systems with a structural approach, for example Verbmobil and CLE.
  • In SFL, a grammatical unit is fully described by the list of types selected during the traversal of the lattice (selection expression). Determinism of generation is ensured by special mechanisms, "choosers", which consult semantic or lexical information.
  • The multilingual resources of KPML are divided into approximately 60 "regions", defined jointly for different languages. The graph of connections between regions shows dependencies and at the same time serves as a navigation menu.
  • The KPML test suites (a semantic specification together with the expected string) are indexed by grammatical features. As a result, they serve both for debugging and for documenting the resources. In parallel, the correspondence between these features and the features of the TSNLP initiative is being investigated.
  • The graphical tools of KPML make it possible for people other than computational linguists to write grammars. They have been used by programmers without linguistic training, text linguists, translators and technical writers.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Topics Text generation

 Institutions

🎓University of StirlingStirling · United Kingdom3 works · 2,588 citations

Cite

Cite as John Bateman. 1997. Some apparently disjoint aims and requirements for grammar development environments” the case of natural language generation. Computational Environments for Grammar Development and Linguistic Engineering.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. arXiv cmp-lg/9711005

@inproceedings{bateman1997some,
  title = {{Some apparently disjoint aims and requirements for grammar development environments” the case of natural language generation}},
  author = {John Bateman},
  booktitle = {Computational Environments for Grammar Development and Linguistic Engineering},
  year = {1997},
  eprint = {cmp-lg/9711005},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/cmp-lg/9711005}
}

References

17 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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