Abstract
The goal of this paper is to deal with a problem hardly ever addressed in natural language generation, conceptual input. In order to be able to express something, one needs to have something to express to begin with: ideas, concepts and thoughts. The question is how to access thoughts and build their representation in form of messages. What are the building blocks? How to organize and index them in order to allow for quick and intuitive access later on?
It is generally believed that ideas precede expressions. Indeed, meanings, imprecise as they may be, tend to precede their expression in language. Yet, message creation is hardly ever a one-step process. Conceptual inputs are generally abstract and underspecified, which implies that they need to get refined later on, possibly even during the expression phase.
In this paper we investigate interactive sentence generation, the focus being on conceptual input, a major component of language generation. Our views will be illustrated via three systems: ILLICO, a system for analyzing/generating sentences and guiding their composition; SPB, a multilingual phrase-book with on the fly generated audio output and Drill Tutor (DT), an exercise generator. While ILLICO is a message-understanding system with a message-completion functionality, SPB and DT are message-specification systems. The user works quite early with fairly complete structures (sentences or patterns), making basically only local changes: replacing words in the case of SPB, and choosing them to instantiate pattern variables in the case of DT.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Baker, C. F., Fillmore, C. J., & Lowe, J. B. (1998). The Berkeley FrameNet project. In COLING/ACL-98. Montreal (pp. 86–90).
Bateman, J., & Zock, M. (2003). Natural language generation. In R. Mitkov (Ed.), Oxford handbook of computational linguistics (pp. 284–304). London: Oxford University Press, Chap. 15.
Boitet, C., Bhattacharyya, P., Blanc, E., Meena, S., Boudhh, S., Fafiotte, G., Falaise, A., & Vacchani, V. (2007). Building Hindi-French-English-UNL resources for SurviTra-CIFLI, a linguistic survival system under construction. In Seventh international symposium on natural language processing. Pattayah (p. 7). Kasetsart University.
Briffault, X., & Zock, M. (1994). What do we mean when we say to the left or to the right? How to learn about space by building and exploring a microworld? In 6th international conference on artificial intelligence: methodology, systems, applications. Sofia (pp. 363–371).
Coq Development Team (2006–2008). The Coq proof assistant. Reference manual. INRIA.
Fellbaum, C. (1998). WordNet: an electronic lexical database and some of its applications. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Fromkin, V. (1993). Speech production. In J. Berko-Gleason & N. B. Ratner (Eds.), Psycholinguistics. Fort Worth: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.
Hearst, M. (1998). Automated discovery of Word-Net relations. In C. Fellbaum (Ed.), WordNet an electronic lexical database (pp. 131–152). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Levelt, W. (1989). Speaking: from intention to articulation. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Ligozat, G., & Zock, M. (1992). How to visualize time, tense and aspect. In Proceedings of COLING ’92. Nantes (pp. 475–482).
McCoy, K., & Cheng, J. (1991). Focus of attention: constraining what can be said next. In C. Paris, W. Swartout, & W. Mann (Eds.), Natural language generation in artificial intelligence and computational linguistics (pp. 103–124). Boston: Kluwer Academic.
Meteer, M. W. (1992). Expressibility and the problem of efficient text planning. London: Pinter.
Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63, 81–97.
Nicolov, N., & Mellish, C. (2000). PROTECTOR: efficient generation with lexicalized grammars. In Recent advances in natural language processing (pp. 221–243). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Current issues in linguistic theory (CILT 189).
Pasero, R., & Sabatier, P. (1995). Guided sentences composition: some problems, solutions and applications. In Proceedings of the 5th international workshop on natural language understanding and logic programming (NLULP). Lisbon (pp. 97–110). Lisbon University.
Pasero, R., & Sabatier, P. (2007). ILLICO: présentation & principes, connaissances et formalismes & guide d’utilisation. Technical report, Laboratoire d’Informatique Fondamentale (LIF), Marseille, http://www.lif.univ-mrs.fr/illico.html.
Power, R., Scott, D., & Evans, R. (1998). What you see is what you meant: direct knowledge editings with natural language feedback. In H. Prade (Ed.), 13th European conference on artificial intelligence (ECAI’98) (pp. 677–681). Chichester: Wiley.
Reiter, E., & Dale, R. (2000). Building natural language generation systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sabatier, P. (1997). Un lexique-grammaire du football. Lingvisticæ Investigationes, 21(1), 163–197.
Schank, R. (1975). Conceptual dependency theory. In R. C. Schank (Ed.), Conceptual information processing (pp. 22–82). Amsterdam/New York: North-Holland/Elsevier.
Schmidt, T. (2007). Multilingual FrameNets. In The Kicktionary—a multilingual lexical resource of football language. New York: de Gruyter.
Tesnière, L. (1959). Éléments de syntaxe structurale. Paris: Klincksieck.
Zock, M. (1991). Swim or sink: the problem of communicating thought. In M. Swartz & M. Yazdani (Eds.), Intelligent tutoring systems for foreign language learning (pp. 235–247). New York: Springer.
Zock, M. (1996). The power of words in message planning. In International conference on computational linguistics. Copenhagen (pp. 990–995).
Zock, M., & Afantenos, S. (2008). Verbal fluency, or how to stay on top of the wave. In B. Sharp & M. Zock (Eds.), NLPCS. Barcelona (pp. 159–164). INSTICC Press.
Zock, M., & Afantenos, S. (2009). Using e-Learning to achieve fluency in foreign languages. In A. Tzanavari & N. Tsapatsoulis (Eds.), Affective, interactive and cognitive methods for e-learning design: creating an optimal education experience. Hershey: IGI Global.
Zock, M., & Schwab, D. (2008). Lexical access based on underspecified input. In Proceedings of the workshop on cognitive aspects of the lexicon (COGALEX 2008). Manchester, United Kingdom (pp. 9–17). Coling 2008.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Zock, M., Sabatier, P. & Jakubiec, L. Message composition based on concepts and goals. Int J Speech Technol 11, 181 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10772-009-9050-8
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10772-009-9050-8