Abstract
This paper describes how linguistic knowledge has been declaratively formalized, using Functional Descriptions (FDs), in the generation module of the SAGE system. SAGE (Sentence Analysis and GEneration) is the Natural Language Front-End of the Dialogue Manager of the Esprit I project Esteam-316.
The present implementation takes advantage of two principles: the dynamic checking of constraints, and the functional unification of knowledge and dynamic objects. In order to provide these functionalities to the previous formalism of FD, we have introduced the notions of Syntactic Components and Current Syntactic Component. The whole sentence is built step by step in a complex tree-like structure. The generation interpreter is able to move upward and downward inside this tree.
In addition, our system validates the use of a lexicon-grammar (drawn from studies by the LADL, Laboratoire d'Automatique Documentaire et Linguistique) for sentence generation. The target language is English, but all of the knowledge bases have been developed in such a way that the generation process is able to support a change of language.
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Bilange, E., Lancel, JM. & Otani, M. Utterance generation using conceptual representations. Mach Translat 7, 41–60 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00239670
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00239670