Incremental syntax generation with tree adjoining grammars

With the increasing capacity of AI systems the design of human--computer interfaces has become a favorite research topic in AI. In this paper we focus on aspects of the output of a computer. The architecture of a sentence generation component -- embedded in the WIP system -- is described. The main emphasis is laid on the motivation for the incremental style of processing and the encoding of adequate linguistic units as rules of a Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar with Unification

Incremental generation for real-time applications

The acceptance of natural language generation systems strongly depends on their capability to facilitate the exchange of information with human users. Current generation systems consider the influence of situational factors on the content and the form of the resulting utterances. However, the need to time their processing flexibly is usually neglected although temporal factors play a central part when directly addressing a human communication partner. A short response time of a system is crucial for its effective use. Furthermore, some applications - e.g., the simultaneous description of ongoing events - even necessitate the interleaving of input consumption and output production, i.e. the use of an incremental processing mode. We claim that incremental processing is a central design principle for developing flexible and efficient generators for speech output. We discuss the advantages of parallel processing for incremental generation and several aspects of control of the generator. An extension of Tree Adjoining Grammar is introduced as an adequate representation formalism for incremental syntactic generation. We present the system VM-GEN - an incremental and parallel syntactic generator based on Tree Adjoining Grammars. It offers flexible input and output interfaces that are adaptable to the requirements of the surrounding system by coping with varying sizes of input and output increments. The system's ability to produce fluent speech is a step towards approximating human language performance

A head-driven approach to incremental and parallel generation of syntactic structures

This paper describes the construction of syntactic structures within an incremental multi-level and parallel generation system. Incremental and parallel generation imposes special requirements upon syntactic description and processing. A head-driven grammar represented in a unification-based formalism is introduced which satisfies these demands. Furthermore the basic mechanisms for the parallel processing of syntactic segments are presented

Plan-based integration of natural language and graphics generation

Multimodal interfaces combining natural language and graphics take advantage of both the individual strength of each communication mode and the fact that several modes can be employed in parallel. The central claim of this paper is that the generation of a multimodal presentation system WIP which allows the generation of alternate presentations of the same content taking into account various contextual factors. We discuss how the plan-based approach to presentation design can be exploited so that graphics generation influences the production of text and vice versa. We show that well-known concepts from the area of natural language processing like speech acts, anaphora, and rhetorical relations take on an extended meaning in the context of multimodal communication. Finally, we discuss two detailed examples illustrating and reinforcing our theoretical claims

A head-driven approach to incremental and parallel generation of syntactic structures

This paper describes the construction of syntactic structures within an incremental multi-level and parallel generation system. Incremental and parallel generation imposes special requirements upon syntactic description and processing. A head-driven grammar represented in a unification-based formalism is introduced which satisfies these demands. Furthermore the basic mechanisms for the parallel processing of syntactic segments are presented

An efficient kernel for multilingual generation in speech--to--speech dialogue translation

We present core aspects of a fully implemented generation component in a multilingual speech-to-speech dialogue translation system. Its de-sign was particularly influenced by the neces-sity of real-time processing and usability for multiple languages and domains. We devel-oped a general kernel system comprising a mi-croplanning and a syntactic realizer module. The microplanner performs lexical and syntac-tic choice, based on constraint-satisfaction tech-niques. The syntactic realizer processes HPSG grammars reflecting the latest; developments of the underlying linguistic theory, utilizing their pre-processing into the TAG formalism. The declarative nature of the knowledge bases, i.e., the microplanning constraints and the HPSG grammars allowed an easy adaption to new do-mains and languages. The successflfl integra-tion of our component into the translation sys-tem Verbmobil proved the fulfillment of the spe-cific real-time constraints.