Design and Implementation of a Tactical Generator for Turkish, a Free Constituent Order Language

a thesis submitted to the department of computer engineering and information science and the institute of engineering and science of bilkent university in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of master of science ii I certify that I have read this thesis and that in my opinion it is fully adequate, in scope and in quality, as a thesis for the degree of Master of Science. I certify that I have read this thesis and that in my opinion it is fully adequate, in scope and in quality, as a thesis for the degree of Master of Science. Dr. _ Ilyas C ii cekli (Co-advisor) I certify that I have read this thesis and that in my opinion it is fully adequate, in scope and in quality, as a thesis for the degree of Master of Science. This thesis describes a tactical generator for Turkish, a free constituent order language, in which the order of the constituents may change according to the information structure of the sentences to be generated. In the absence of any information regarding the information structure of a sentence (i.e., topic, focus, background, etc.), the constituents of the sentence obey a default order, but the order is almost freely changeable, depending on the constraints of the text ow or discourse. We have used a recursively structured nite state machine for handling the changes in constituent order, implemented as a right-linear grammar backbone. Our implementation environment is the GenKit system , developed at Carnegie Mellon University{Center for Machine Translation. Morphological realization has been implemented using an external morphological analysis/generation component which performs concrete morpheme selection and handles morphographemic processes.