Understanding Natural Language
Understanding Natural Language
Floating constraints in lexical choice
Computational Linguistics
Computational Linguistics
Salience: the key to the selection problem in natural language generation
ACL '82 Proceedings of the 20th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
Research at the U. of Massachusetts at Amherst
ACM SIGART Bulletin
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Ultimately in any natural language production system the largest amount of human effort will go into the construction of the dictionary: the data base that associates objects and relations in the program's domain with the words and phrases that could be used to describe them. This paper describes a technique for basing the dictionary directly on the semantic abstraction network used for the domain knowledge itself, taking advantage of the inheritance and specialization machanisms of a network formalism such as KL-ONE. The technique creates considerable economics of scale, and makes possible the automatic description of individual objects according to their position in the semantic net. Furthermore, because the process of deciding what properties to use in an object's description is now given over to a common procedure, we can write general-purpose rules to, for example, avoid redundancy or grammatically awkward constructions.