From Systemic-Functional Grammar to Systemic-Functional Text Generation: Escalating the Exchange

Book excerpt: The boundaries between planning and realization within generation are a standard division in a natural language processing, although they no longer seem so secure. New territorial divisions appear necessary, but it is still unclear where the borders are best drawn. This report shows that systemic-functional linguistics (SFL) offers a rich body of linguistic work concerned precisely with issues that are coming to the forefront in natural language processing. This work provides theoretically well-motivated and thorough guidance in an area where text planning and generation are still lacking in experience: the treatment of text in context for the purposes of communication and social interaction. Many of the issues raised in text planning are also addressed within the SFL tradition; SFL can provide an extremely detailed and beneficial map of the territory through which we now need to move. Keywords: Computational systemic linguistics, Text generation, Text planning.