Generation Systems Should Choose Their Words

Almost all current natural language generation... rhetorical structures and the like. While we have undertaken the understanding of such subtle phenomena, and have attempted to build systems which sound highly fluent, we have avoided research on what would make such systems mean the literal content of the words they use. The alternative, which we must face up to sooner or later, is to attack the closely related problems of lexical semantics and lexical choice directly. In an ideal world, I believe, a NLG system should have available to it a lexicon of words and their meanings, represented in a nondomain specific way, along with a general mechanism which uses this representation to map a message in "Mentalese" into whatever words are appropriate to realizing the meaning embodied in it. One might well expect such a system to somehow compile or invert this lexicon into a representation which allows this process to be executed efficiently, but the meaning of a word (in non-domain specific terms) should be encoded, even if implicitly, in suc..