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Instance-based natural language generation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 May 2010

S. VARGES  and
C. MELLISH
S. VARGES
Affiliation:
Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, University of Trento, Via Sommarive, 14 38050 Povo (TN), Italy e-mail: varges@disi.unitn.it
C. MELLISH
Affiliation:
Department of Computing Science, University of Aberdeen, King's College, Aberdeen AB24 3UE, UK e-mail: c.mellish@abdn.ac.uk
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Abstract

We investigate the use of instance-based ranking methods for surface realization in natural language generation. Our approach to instance-based natural language generation (IBNLG) employs two components: a rule system that ‘overgenerates’ a number of realization candidates from a meaning representation and an instance-based ranker that scores the candidates according to their similarity to examples taken from a training corpus. We develop an efficient search technique for identifying the optimal candidate based on a novel extension of the A* algorithm. The rule system is produced automatically from a semantically annotated fragment of the Penn Treebank II containing management succession texts. We detail the annotation scheme and grammar induction algorithm and evaluate the efficiency and output of the generator. We also discuss issues such as input coverage (completeness) and fluency that are relevant to surface generation in general.

Type
Papers
Information
Natural Language Engineering , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , July 2010 , pp. 309 - 346
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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