A Contrastive Study of Functional Unification Grammar for Surface Language Generation: A Case Study in Choice of Connectives

Abstract

Language generation systems have used a variety of grammatical formalisms for producing syntactic structure and yet, there has been little research evaluating the formalisms for the specifics of the generation task. In our work at Columbia we have primarily used a unification based formalism, a Functional Unification Grammar (FUG) [Kay 79] and have found it well suited for many of the generation tasks we have addressed. Over the course of the past 5 years we have also explored the use of various off-the-shelf parsing formalisms, including an Augmented Transition Network (ATN) [Woods 701], a Bottom-Up Chart Parser (SUP) [Finin 84], and a Declarative Clause Grammar (DCG) [Pereira and Warren 80]. In contrast, we have found that parsing formalisms do not have the same benefits for the generation task