YAG: a template-based generator for real-time systems

• Authors: Susan W. McRoy;Songsak Channarukul;Syed S. Ali
• Venue: INLG '00 Proceedings of the first international conference on Natural language generation - Volume 14
• Year: 2000

YAG (Yet Another Generator) is a real-time, general-purpose, template-based generation system that will enable interactive applications to adapt natural language output to the interactive context without requiring developers to write all possible output strings ahead of time or to embed extensive knowledge of the grammar of the target language in the application. Currently, designers of interactive systems who might wish to include dynamically generated text face a number of barriers; for example designers must decide (1) How hard will it be to link the application to the generator? (2) Will the generator be fast enough? (3) How much linguistic information will the application need to provide in order to get reasonable quality output? (5) How much effort will be required to write a generation grammar that covers all the potential outputs of the application? The design and implementation of YAG is intended to address each of these concerns. In particular, YAG offers the following benefits to applications and application designers:Support for Underspecified Inputs YAG supports knowledge-based systems by accepting two types of inputs: applications can either provide a feature structure (a set of featurevalue pairs) or provide a syntactically underspecified semantic structure that YAG will map onto a feature-based representation for realization. YAG also provides an opportunity for an application to add syntactic constraints, such as whether to express a proposition as a question rather than a statement, as a noun-phrase rather than as a sentence, or as a pronoun rather than a full noun phrase.