Reports

Comparison of Surface Language Generators: A Case Study in Choice of Connectives

McKeown, Kathleen; Elhadad, Michael

Language generation systems have used a variety of grammatical formalisms for producing syntactic structure and yet, there has been little research evaluating the formalisms for the specifics of the generation task. In our work at Columbia we have primarily used a unification based formalism, a Functional Unification Grammar (FUG) [Kay 79] and have found it well suited for many of the generation tasks we have addressed. Over the course of the past 5 years we have also explored the use of various off-the-shelf parsing formalisms, including an Augmented Transition Network (ATN) [Woods 70]. a Bottom-Up Chan Parser (BUP) [Finin 84], and a Declarative Clause Grammar (DCG) [Pereira & Warren 80]. In this paper, we identify the characteristics of FDG that we find useful for generation and contrast these with characteristics of the parsing formalisms and with other formalisms that are typically used for generation.

Subjects

Files

More About This Work

Academic Units
Computer Science
Publisher
Department of Computer Science, Columbia University
Series
Columbia University Computer Science Technical Reports, CUCS-407-88
Published Here
December 21, 2011