A formal theory of word order: a case study in West Germanic

This thesis has three primary goals . The first goal is to provide a treatrnent of bounded discontinuous constituency and word order in genera! and semi-free word order in particular. Bounded discontinuous constituency is taken to mean the kind of category-bounded discontinuity typically found in the German Mit­telfeld and in Dutch "cross-serial'' dependency constructions. It does not mean unbounded dependencies such as wh-movement. The second goal is to provide an alternative account of cross-linguistic variation in word order (particularly in West Germanic) to the Principles and Parameters approach of Government and Binding Theory. The third goal is to formalise the account in a single homogeneous logical formalism which is not based on rewrite rules or other formal language theoretic machinery

A Reference Architecture for Natural Language Generation Systems

We present the RAGS (Reference Architecture for Generation Systems) framework: a specification of an abstract Natural Language Generation (NLG) system architecture to support sharing, re-use, comparison and evaluation of NLG technologies. We argue that the evidence from a survey of actual NLG systems calls for a different emphasis in a reference proposal from that seen in similar initiatives in information extraction and multimedia interfaces. We introduce the framework itself, in particular the two-level data model that allows us to support the complex data requirements of NLG systems in a flexible and coherent fashion, and describe our efforts to validate the framework through a range of implementations

A Logical Treatment of Semi-Free Word Order and Bounded Discontinuous Constituency

free word order and bounded discontinuous constituency. We extend standard feature value logics to treat word order in a single formalism with a rigorous semantics without phrase structure rules. The elimination of phrase structure rules allows a natural generalisation of the approach to nonconfigurational word order and bounded discontinuous continuency via sequence union. Sequence union formalises the notions of clause union and scrambling by providing a mechanism for describing word order domains larger than the local tree. The formalism incorporates the distinction between bounded and unbounded forms of discontinuous constituency. Grammars are organised as algebraic theories. This means that linguistic generalisations are stated as axioms about the structure of signs. This permits a natural interpretation of implicational universals in terms of theories, subtheories and implicational axioms. The accompanying linguistic analysis is eclectic, borrowing insights from many current linguistic theories

Expressing Generalizations in Unification-Based Grammar Formalisms

This paper shows how higher levels of generalizatlon can be introduced into unification grammars by exploiting methods for typing grammatical objects. We discuss the strategy of using global declarations to limit possible linguistic structures, and sketch a few unusual aspects of our type-checking algorithm. We also describe the sort system we use in our semantic representation language and illustrate the expressive power gained by being able to state global constraints over these sorts. Finally, we briefly illustrate the sort system by applying it to some agreement phenomena and to problems of adjunct resolution

doi:10.1017/S1351324906004104 Printed in the United Kingdom A Reference Architecture for Natural Language Generation Systems∗

We present the rags (Reference Architecture for Generation Systems) framework: a specification of an abstract Natural Language Generation (NLG) system architecture to support sharing, re-use, comparison and evaluation of NLG technologies. We argue that the evidence from a survey of actual NLG systems calls for a different emphasis in a reference proposal from that seen in similar initiatives in information extraction and multimedia interfaces. We introduce the framework itself, in particular the two-level data model that allows us to support the complex data requirements of NLG systems in a flexible and coherent fashion, and describe our efforts to validate the framework through a range of implementations.