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Monitoring Conceptual and Linguistic Decisions to Generate Coherent Text

Blumenstyck, Michal; McKeown, Kathleen

The extent and type of interaction that must occur between conceptual and linguistic decisions in a language generation system has been the subject of much debate. In this paper, we present general principles which can account for two classes of examples where interaction must occur. We identify how lexical choice and the choice between (passive with and without agent) influences text structure, determining the order of two consecutive propositions. Our account of the interaction allows for monitoring of the generation process so that an ordering of propositions can be retracted if lexical choice or syntactic construction requires a different ordering. Our approach generalizes across domains and we have implemented it as part of a domain independent language generator which is presented here.

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Academic Units
Computer Science
Publisher
Department of Computer Science, Columbia University
Series
Columbia University Computer Science Technical Reports, CUCS-260-87
Published Here
November 7, 2011