1990 Reports

Lexical Choice in Natural Language Generation

Robin, Jacques

In this paper we survey the issue of lexical choice in natural language generation. We first define lexical choice as the choice of open-class lexical items (whether phrasal patterns or individual words) appropriate to express the content units of the utterance being generated in a given situation of enunciation. We then distinguish between five major classes of constraints on lexical choice: grammatical, inter-lexical, encyclopedic, interpersonal and discursive. For each class we review how they have been represented and used in existing generators. We conclude by pointing out the common limitations of these generators with respect to lexical choice as well as some directions for future research in the field.