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SUMMARY:Extending a Surface Realizer to Generate Coherent Discourse - Eva 
 Banik\, Open University
DTSTART:20090605T110000Z
DTEND:20090605T120000Z
UID:TALK18775@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Johanna Geiss
DESCRIPTION:The ultimate aim of research on natural language generation is
  to develop large-scale\, domain independent NLG systems\, which are able 
 to generate high quality\, fluent and well-formatted texts. In order to pr
 oduce high quality\, coherent text\, generators need to be able to model r
 eferential coherence and pronominalization\, insert appropriate discourse 
 connectives using appropriate constructions (e.g. preposed\, postposed or 
 interposed subordinate clauses) and provide a way for the user to specify 
 which bits of information should be emphasized in the text.\n\nMany NLG sy
 stems use a pipeline architecture where linguistic information is distribu
 ted across several system modules. These systems typically introduce addit
 ional modules (e.g. an aggregation or revision module) in order to model t
 he above phenomena\, resulting in more complex systems with limited flexib
 ility. Using this approach\, the research challenges in NLG become system 
 engineering tasks\, limited to questions such as: what modules should a sy
 stem have\, how should these modules be ordered\, and how should the inter
 actions between modules be handled.\n\nIn this talk I would like to presen
 t a slightly different perspective\, where some of the research challenges
  in NLG are reformulated as grammar engineering tasks. I will argue that w
 hen linguistic resources in an NLG system are centralized we can model con
 straints on discourse coherence by simply incorporating more linguistic in
 formation into the grammar of a surface realizer. This approach improves t
 he flexibility of the system (i.e. produces more paraphrases for the same 
 input) and makes it possible to generate coherent text without additional 
 modules. 
LOCATION:SW01\, Computer Laboratory
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