Incremental syntactic generation of natural language with tree adjoining grammars

This document combines the basic ideas of my master´s thesis - which has been developped within the WIP project - with new results from my work as a member of WIP, as far as they concern the integration and further development of the implemented system. ISGT (in German \u27Inkrementeller Syntaktischer Generierer natürlicher Sprache mit TAGs´) is a syntactic component for a text generation system and is based on Tree Adjoining Grammars. It is lexically guided and consists of two levels of syntactic processing: A component that computes the hierarchical structure of the sentence under construction (hierarchical level) and a component that computes the word position and utters the sentence (positional level). The central aim of this work has been to design a syntactic generator that computes sentences in an incremental fashion. The realization of the incremental syntactic generator has been supported by a distributed parallel model that is used to speed up the computation of single parts of the sentence

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

Tree adjoining grammars mit Unifikation

Tree Adjoining Grammars (TAGs) - as used in the parsing algorithm of Harbusch - can be improved with respect to compactness and transparency for the task of grammar design. We have combined the two formalisms Tree Adjoining Grammar and Unification in order to benefit from their respective advantages. Our approach is contrasted with the approach of Vijay-Shanker

Essays on the Economics of Food Access in The United States

116 pagesFood access in the United States has been a topic of considerable debate for the past decade. This thesis explores three different facets of food access and provides policy implications to shed light on solutions. Chapter 2 analyzes the effect of the national Fresh Fruits and Vegetables Program (FFVP) on the formation of simulated preferences for healthy food. The results suggest that early and consistent exposure to FFVP is more beneficial than late or sporadic exposure conditional on the number of years of exposure. FFVP may also be more beneficial to children living in low food access areas. Chapter 3 models how income segregation affects food access in the presence of heterogeneous transportation costs. When there is high income segregation, the model suggests that grocery stores locate closer to wealthy individuals. However, when there is lower income segregation, the average distance any person has to travel to reach the grocery store is decreased. Chapter 4 explores the implications of a sprawl development pattern on grocery store location in the United States. There are fewer grocery stores in more car dependent areas because transportation costs are lower and grocery stores cannot differentiate of location to the same extent that they can when transportation costs are higher. Additionally, for those individuals who do not have cars, it is easier to walk and use public transportation in less car dependent areas. These three essays illuminate different aspects of food access and seek to inform the conversation on this topic

Médiations thérapeutiques

International audienc

« Médiations thérapeutiques»

International audienc

Wip: The automatic synthesis of multimodal presentations

Due to the growing complexity of information that has to be communicated by current AI systems, there comes an increasing need for building advanced intelligent user interfaces that take advantage of a coordinated combination of different modalities, e.g., natural language, graphics, and animation, to produce situated and user-adaptive presentations. A deeper understanding of the basic principles underlying multimodal communication requires theoretical work on computational models as well as practical work on concrete systems. In this article, we describe the system WIP, an implemented prototype of a knowledge-based presentation system that generates illustrated texts that are customized for the intended audience and situation. We present the architecture of WIP and introduce as its major components the presentation planner, the layout manager, and the generators for text and graphics. To achieve a coherent output with an optimal media mix, the single components have to be interleaved. The interplay of the presentation planner, the text and the graphics generator will be demonstrated by means of a system run. In particular, we show how a text-picture combination containing