The Linguistic Basis of Text Generation

Book excerpt: This study presents an original and penetrating analysis of the complex problems surrounding the automatic generation of natural language text. Laurence Danlos provides a valuable critical review of research in this important and increasingly active field and goes on to describe a theoretical model that is thoroughly grounded in linguistic principles. The model emphasises the semantic, syntactic and lexical constraints that must be dealt with when establishing a relationship between meaning and form and it is consideration of such linguistic constraints that determines Danlos' generation algorithm. The book concludes with a description of a generation system based on this algorithm which produces texts in several domains and also a system for the synthesis of spoken messages from semantic representation. The book is a significant addition to the literature on text generation and will be of particular interest to all computational linguists and AI researchers who have wrestled with the problem of vocabulary selection.