CHAPTER 6 – CONCEPTUAL GENERATION

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the conceptual generation. The third major component of MARGIE is the program for generating natural language sentences from conceptual dependency representations. Like the analysis program, this generator was designed to be task independent and domain independent. That is, it is concerned with those aspects of generation that is common to machine translation and question answering and to conversations about department stores or parties or toy blocks. BABEL—this is not an acronym of anything but is much simpler to write and read than the conceptual generator—has actually been tested in three task areas. The first is sentence paraphrasing. In this task, a sentence is typed by a human, analyzed by a conceptual analysis program, and paraphrases, or multiple realizations, are produced by BABEL from its conceptual representation. The second area might be termed inference expression. In this task, a sentence is typed to the computer and, following conceptual analysis, the memory model produces a set of inferences. These inferences, themselves conceptual representations, are passed to BABEL for expression in English.