Abstract
A computational theory of syntactic style was incorporated at all levels of an existing natural language generation system, Penman, showing how a combination of top-down and opportunistic planning can be used to generate sentences that must satisfy specific stylistic goals. The low-level incorporation of the theory included making additions and modifications to the Nigel systemic grammar that allow the generation of sentence components to be controlled on the basis of stylistic, as well as syntactic, criteria. These modifications were tied to a high-level stylistic control mechanism. We show how this mechanism can make decisions between syntactic structures on the basis of stylistic considerations.
The authors would like to thank Graeme Hirst for his comments on earlier versions of this paper. Thanks also to Eduard Hovy, Lynn Poulton, and Richard Whitney for their help with the implementation. The authors acknowledge the financial support of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and the Information Technology Research Centre.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Cluett, R.: Prose style and critical reading. Teacher's College Press, Columbia University, 1976
Crystal, D.,Davy, D.: Investigating English style. Indiana University Press, 1969
DiMarco, C.: Computational Stylistics for natural language translation. PhD thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, 1990. Published as technical report CSRI-239
DiMarco, C, Green, S.J., Mah, K., Makuta-Giluk, M., and Ryan, M.: Four papers on computational stylistics. University of Waterloo Faculty of Mathematics technical report CS-92-48
DiMarco, C., Hirst, G.: “A computational approach to style in language”. Computational Linguistics, 19(4) (1993) 449–497
Green, S.J.: A basis for a formalization of linguistic style. Proceedings of the Student Sessions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, June 1992, Newark, Delaware, 1992a. Published in University of Waterloo Faculty of Mathematics technical report CS-92-35
Green, S.J.: “A functional theory of style for natural language generation.” MMath thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 1992b
Halliday, M.A.K.: An introduction to functional grammar. Edward Arnold, 1985
Halliday, M.A.K. and Hasan, R.: Cohesion in English. Longman, 1976
Hovy, E.H.: Generating natural language under pragmatic constraints. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1988
Hoyt, P.: An efficient functional-based stylistic analyser. MMath thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 1993
The Penman natural language generation group (1988). The Penman documentation. Information Sciences Institute, 1988
Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., and Svartvik, J.: A comprehensive grammar of the English language. Longman, 1985
Stede, M.: Lexical choice criteria in language generation. Proceedings of the Student Sessions of the Sixth Conference of the European chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, April 1993, Utrecht, The Netherlands, 454–459
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1996 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Green, S.J., DiMarco, C. (1996). Stylistic decision-making in natural language generation. In: Adorni, G., Zock, M. (eds) Trends in Natural Language Generation An Artificial Intelligence Perspective. EWNLG 1993. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1036. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-60800-1_27
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-60800-1_27
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-60800-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-49457-7
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive