Issues in the choice of a source for natural language generation
David D. McDonald · 1993
The most vexing question in natural language generation is 'what is the source'--what do speakers start from when they begin to compose an utterance? Theories of generation in the literature differ markedly in their assumptions. A few start with an unanalyzed body of numerical data (e.g. Bourbeau et al. 1990; Kukich 1988). Most start with the structured objects that are used by a particular reasoning system or simulator and are cast in that system's representational formalism (e.g. Hovy 1990; Meteer 1992; R6sner 1988). A growing number of systems, largely focused on problems in machine translation or grammatical theory, take their input to be logical formulae based on lexical predicates (e.g. Wedekind 1988; Shieber et al. 1990). The lack of a consistent answer to the question of the generator's source has been at the heart of the problem of how to make research on generation intelligible and engaging for the rest of the computational linguistics community, and has complicated efforts to evaluate alternative treatments even for people in the field. Nevertheless, a source cannot be imposed by fiat. Differences in what information is assumed to be available, its relative decomposition when compared to the "packaging " available in