Syntactic and Semantic Problems in Automatic Sentence Generation

A program for automatic sentence generation (ASG) has been developed~cJ/~,.r in the linguistic group at The RAND Corporation, as a device for study/ ~ / ing selected problems in syntax and distributional semantics. The general purpose of the study is to test certain linguistic assumptions by experimentation:" what is the result when a computer program "composes" sentences on the basis of these assumptions? The assumptions, and their implementation in the computer program, are subject to modification, as deficiencies are observed in the output sentences. This trial-and-error procedure is presently at an early stage of development; the present paper is a brief, non-technical description of the procedure, and a report on some of the initial problems encountered, together with tentative solutions. The ultimate goal of the research is the generation of "paragraphs" (meaningful strings of sentences) as a contribution towards automatic abstracting.