Incremental Lexical Choice Constrained by Generation Parameters

In the following paper, principal ideas for an incremental lexical choice process guided by generation constraints during the incremental natural language generation in the WIP system are presented. In this approach, a most adequate expression for an arbitraryly complex conceptual description is processed by examining a list of constraining generation parameters like time to produce the result, style of the produced text, habituality, etc. The component works incrementaly in the sense that knowledge arriving later leads to further constraints on the selection process. In the following paper, basic concepts of our first prototype for the incremental lexical choice — e.g., an anytime approach — are described. 1 General Suggestions on the Lexical Choice Process in Natural Language Generation The acceptance of an AI system depends directly on its user interface facilities. For the direction of output this means that situationally adequate text — instead of canned text prepared for a general situation — should be produced (e.g., the generation of a summarizing statement to avoid repetitions of the same canned text). The process of natural language generation can be divided into three major tasks (see, e.g., [Levelt 89]): • Macro planning (MAP) means the elaboration of the communicative intention as a sequence of subgoals, and the selection of information to be expressed in order to realize these communicative goals. WIP is the acronym for ”Wissenbasierte Informationspräsentation”. The WIP project is supported by the German Ministry of Research and Technology under grant ITW8901 8.