Syntactic generation
Gertjan van Noord, Guenter Neumann · 1997
Introduction We can often distinguish two components in a natural language generation module. On the one hand it should be decided what should be said. This task is delegated to a `planning' component. Such a component might produce an expression representing the content of the proposed utterance. On the basis of this representation the syntactic generation component produces the actual output sentence(s). Although the distinction between planning and syntactic generation is not uncontroversial, we will nonetheless assume such an archictecture here, in order to explain some of the issues that come up in syntactic generation. A (natural language) grammar is a formal device that defines a relation between (natural language) utterances and their corresponding meanings. In practice this usually means that a grammar defines a relation between strings and logical forms. During natural language understanding, the trick is to come up with the logical form that correspo