3 research outputs found
Bootstrapping Lexical Choice via Multiple-Sequence Alignment
An important component of any generation system is the mapping dictionary, a
lexicon of elementary semantic expressions and corresponding natural language
realizations. Typically, labor-intensive knowledge-based methods are used to
construct the dictionary. We instead propose to acquire it automatically via a
novel multiple-pass algorithm employing multiple-sequence alignment, a
technique commonly used in bioinformatics. Crucially, our method leverages
latent information contained in multi-parallel corpora -- datasets that supply
several verbalizations of the corresponding semantics rather than just one.
We used our techniques to generate natural language versions of
computer-generated mathematical proofs, with good results on both a
per-component and overall-output basis. For example, in evaluations involving a
dozen human judges, our system produced output whose readability and
faithfulness to the semantic input rivaled that of a traditional generation
system.Comment: 8 pages; to appear in the proceedings of EMNLP-200