A Fast and Portable Realizer for Text Generation Systems

摘要

Systems that generate natural language output as part of their interaction with a user have become a major area of research and development. Typically, natural language generation is divided into several phases, namely text planning (determining output content and structure), sentence planning (determining abstract target language resources to express content, such as lexical items and syntactic constructions), and realization (producing the final text string) (Reiter, 1994). While text and sentence planning may sometimes be combined, a realizer is almost always included as a distinct module. It is in the realizer that knowledge about the target language resides (syntax, morphology, idiosyncratic properties of lexical items). Realization is fairly well understood both from a linguistic and from a computational point of view, and therefore most projects that use text generation do not include the realizer in the scope of their research. Instead, such projects use an off-the-shelf realizer, among which PENMAN (Bateman, 1996) and SURGE/FUF (Elhadad and Robin, 1996) are probably the most popular.