The SEMSYN Generation System: Ingredients, Applications, Prospects

We report about the current status of the SEMSYN generation system. This system -initially implemented within a Japanese to German MT project – has been applied to a variety of generation tasks both within MT and text generation. We will work out how these applications enhanced the system's capacities. 1. THE STARTING POINT The SEMSYN project began in 1983 with an MT application as starting point. We had to investigate the possibility of using semantic structures derived from Japanese as input to a generator for German. The semantic structures were produced from Japanese titles of papers in information technology by the parser of Fujitsu's ATLAS/II-system, the German generator had to be designed and implemented by SEMSYN. A first prototype was presented at the end of 1984, further enhanced versions of this Japanese/ German system were demonstrated at various meetings, e.g. COLING-86 [Rösner 86a]. 2. DESIGN GUIDELINES When we designed and implemented the initial SEMSYN generator we tried to base this work on guidelines like the following [Rösner 86b]: — The implemented system should not be confined by its first application. Since we had only little influence on the format of the output of our partner's parser for Japanese we designed a more general frame language that served as input to our system. — The generator should be easily extensible and transportable to other applications. This gave strong motivation for choosing an object-oriented implementation technique.