Floating constraints in lexical choice

Lexical choice is a computationally complex task, requiring a generation system to consider a potentially large number of mappings between concepts and words. Constraints that aid in determining which word is best come from a wide variety of sources, including syntax, semantics, pragmatics, the lexicon, and the underlying domain. Furthermore, in some situations, different constraints come into play early on, while in others, they apply much later. This makes it difficult to determine a systematic ordering in which to apply constraints. In this paper, we present a general approach to lexical choice that can handle multiple, interacting constraints. We focus on the problem of floating constraints, semantic or pragmatic constraints that float, appearing at a variety of different syntactic ranks, often merged with other semantic constraints. This means that multiple content units can be realized by a single surface element, and conversely, that a single content unit can be realized by a variety of surface elements. Our approach uses the Functional Unification Formalism (FUF) to represent a generation lexicon, allowing for declarative and compositional representation of individual constraints

Generating Argumentative Judgment Determiners

This paper presents a procedure to generate judgment determiners, e.g., many, few. Although such determiners carry very little objective information, they are extensively used in everyday language. The paper presents a precise characterization of a class of such determiners using three semantic tests. A conceptual representation for sets is then derived from this characterization which can serve as an input to a generator capable of producing judgment determiners. In a second part, a set of syntactic features controlling the realization of complex determiner sequences is presented. The mapping from the conceptual input to this set of syntactic features is then presented. The presented procedure relies on a description of the speaker's argumentative intent to control this mapping and to select appropriate judgment determiners. Introduction There are cases when answering many is a sign of ignorance: Teacher: How many neutrons are there in an atom of Uranium? Child: m..