Natural Language Generation
An essay on Natural Language Generation
Are you sitting comfortably? I really, really like Natural Language Generation. Indispensable to homosapians today, it is yet to receive proper recognition for laying the foundations of democracy. It is estimated that that Natural Language Generation is thought about eight times every day by socialists, who form the last great hope for our civilzation. In the light of this I will break down the issues in order to give each of them the thought that they fully deserve.
Template Filling Congratulations Eric . You have been
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Phrase Based Systems Generalized Templates Phrase Pattern matched at top level
[SUBJECT VERB OBJECT][NP VP][Det Adj Noun]Etc.
Phrase Based Systems Creates sentences effectively Limited to one sentence
Scalability limited by interrelationships
Feature Based Systems Dictated by the characteristics of the
sentence desired Positive/Negative Interrogative/Declarative Past/Present
Feature Based Systems Simplistic
Language creation defined by the features
New distinctions are just added to the list of other features
Cyc Created by Cycorp, Inc.
Austin, TX “The Cyc Knowledge Server is a very
large, multi-contextual knowledge base and inference engine”
NL Processing Subsystem Syntactic Parser
{:SENTENCE {:NP {:DETP {#$Determiner [the]}} {:N-BAR {#$SimpleNoun [man]}}} {:VP {#$Verb [saw]} {:NP {:DETP {#$Determiner [the]}} {:N-BAR {#$SimpleNoun [light]}} {:PP {#$Preposition [with]} {:NP {:DETP {#$Determiner [the]}} {:N-BAR {#$SimpleNoun [telescope]}}}}}}}}
The man saw the light with the telescope.
NL Processing Subsystem Semantic Interpreter
“Mary believes that the blue hat is pretty“
(#$believes :SUBJECT :CLAUSE)
Research Cyc Based on OpenCyc Open Source Linux Based Has NLG capabilities
Hybrid Phrase/Feature Based
Research Cyc “ResearchCyc is a version of the Cyc
technology designed specifically for use by researchers”
The Problems with Meaningful Generation Limited to specific domains Not ready for Primetime Some useful “dumb” applications
are still available
SCIGen Computer Science Research Paper G
enerator “Our aim here is to maximize amusement,
rather than coherence.” CSC 2180
References Bateman, J. A. and Teich, E. (1995), `Selective information presentation in an integrated
publication system: an application of genre-driven text generation', Information Processing and Management 31(5), 753-767.
Bhattacharya, S, ‘Natural Language Generation’, accessed 2005 – available via Web: http://www.mla.iitkgp.ernet.in/~monojit/slides/NLG.ppt
Uszkoreit, H ‘Language Generation’ accessed 2005 – available via Web: http://cslu.cse.ogi.edu/HLTsurvey/ch4node2.html
Natural language generation : third international conference, INLG 2004, Brockenhurst, UK, July 14-16, 2004 : proceedings / Anja Belz, Roger Evans, Paul Piwek (eds.)
ResearchCyc – Cycorp Inc., accessed 2005 – available via Web: http://researchcyc.cyc.com