Natural Language Generation

Eric ClarkCSC 9010-002

Natural Language Generation

An essay on Natural Language Generation

Are you sitting comfortably? I really, really like Natural Language Generation. Indispensable to homosapians today, it is yet to receive proper recognition for laying the foundations of democracy. It is estimated that that Natural Language Generation is thought about eight times every day by socialists, who form the last great hope for our civilzation. In the light of this I will break down the issues in order to give each of them the thought that they fully deserve.

NLG – Application Types Canned Text Template Filling Phrase Based Systems Feature Based Systems

Canned Text Download Complete “PC Load Letter”. What does that

mean?

Template Filling Congratulations Eric . You have been

pre-approved for a low 6.9 % interest rate on your new Citibank Gold Plus Titanium Super Mastercard.

Template Filling Mail Merge Smartform.com Aestiva

Phrase Based Systems Generalized Templates Phrase Pattern matched at top level

[SUBJECT VERB OBJECT][NP VP][Det Adj Noun]Etc.

Phrase Based Systems Creates sentences effectively Limited to one sentence

Scalability limited by interrelationships

Feature Based Systems Dictated by the characteristics of the

sentence desired Positive/Negative Interrogative/Declarative Past/Present

Feature Based Systems Simplistic

Language creation defined by the features

New distinctions are just added to the list of other features

Cyc Created by Cycorp, Inc.

Austin, TX “The Cyc Knowledge Server is a very

large, multi-contextual knowledge base and inference engine”

Cyc Knowledge Base Inference Engine NL Processing Subsystem

Knowledge Base Facts Rules of Thumb Heuristics

Terms Assertions

Inference Engine Logical Deduction Inference Mechanisms Best-first search

NL Processing Subsystem Lexicon Syntactic Parser Semantic Interpreter

NL Processing Subsystem Lexicon

NL Processing Subsystem Syntactic Parser

{:SENTENCE {:NP {:DETP {#$Determiner [the]}} {:N-BAR {#$SimpleNoun [man]}}} {:VP {#$Verb [saw]} {:NP {:DETP {#$Determiner [the]}} {:N-BAR {#$SimpleNoun [light]}} {:PP {#$Preposition [with]} {:NP {:DETP {#$Determiner [the]}} {:N-BAR {#$SimpleNoun [telescope]}}}}}}}}

The man saw the light with the telescope.

NL Processing Subsystem Semantic Interpreter

“Mary believes that the blue hat is pretty“

(#$believes :SUBJECT :CLAUSE)

Research Cyc Based on OpenCyc Open Source Linux Based Has NLG capabilities

Hybrid Phrase/Feature Based

Research Cyc “ResearchCyc is a version of the Cyc

technology designed specifically for use by researchers”

The Problems with Meaningful Generation Limited to specific domains Not ready for Primetime Some useful “dumb” applications

are still available

SCIGen Computer Science Research Paper G

enerator “Our aim here is to maximize amusement,

rather than coherence.” CSC 2180

Communications from Elsewhere

Bad Poetry Band Names Post Modernism

Other Examples List of Work in NLG

References Bateman, J. A. and Teich, E. (1995), `Selective information presentation in an integrated

publication system: an application of genre-driven text generation', Information Processing and Management 31(5), 753-767.

Bhattacharya, S, ‘Natural Language Generation’, accessed 2005 – available via Web: http://www.mla.iitkgp.ernet.in/~monojit/slides/NLG.ppt

Uszkoreit, H ‘Language Generation’ accessed 2005 – available via Web: http://cslu.cse.ogi.edu/HLTsurvey/ch4node2.html

Natural language generation : third international conference, INLG 2004, Brockenhurst, UK, July 14-16, 2004 : proceedings / Anja Belz, Roger Evans, Paul Piwek (eds.)

ResearchCyc – Cycorp Inc., accessed 2005 – available via Web: http://researchcyc.cyc.com