1993 Presentations (Communicative Events)

Generating Argumentative Judgment Determiners

Elhadad, Michael

This paper presents a procedure to generate judgment determiners, e.g., many, few. Although such determiners carry very little objective information, they are extensively used in everyday language. The paper presents a precise characterization of a class of such determiners using three semantic tests. A conceptual representation for sets is then derived from this characterization which can serve as an input to a generator capable of producing judgment determiners. In a second part, a set of syntactic features controlling the realization of complex determiner sequences is presented. The mapping from the conceptual input to this set of syntactic features is then presented. The presented procedure relies on a description of the speaker's argumentative intent to control this mapping and to select appropriate judgment determiners.