Linguistic ways for expressing a discourse relation in a lexicalized text generation system
Laurence Danlos · 1998
... this paper goes in this line. In general, a discourse relation can be realized in many different ways. in addition to traditional ways such as a text made up of two sentences with or without a cue phrase (Ted hammered the metal (ThereJove), it is flat), there exist other ways such as a single sentence, e.g. a "resultalive construction" (Ted hammered the metal flat) or an "operator verb construction" Ted's hammering the metal caused it to be flat). The question arises: given the numerous and heterogeneous set of possible linguistic realizations, how can these possible realizations be expressed in a linguistically motivated manner so that a natural language processing system can make use of this knowledge'?. This paper presents a uniform framework for expressing the linguistic knowledge needed to relate discourse relations to linguis- tic realizations. in addition, it sketches how such a representation can be used during the linguistic planning stage of text generation and pt?esents a letrealized text generation system designed in the lines of a lexicalized grammar for sentence analysis. In such a system, lexical entries give semantic and syntactic information in a well defined structure. Therefore, the generation process for linguistic choices relies mainly upon a unique operation: lexicalization, i.e. choice of a lexical item with its semantic and syntactic structure to express a concept.