Collocations in Multilingual Natural Language Generation: Lexical Functions meet Lexical Functional Grammar

In a collocation, the choice of one lexical item depends on the choice made for another. This poses a problem for simple approaches to lexicalisation in natural language generation systems. In the Meaning-Text framework, recurrent patterns of collocations have been characterised by lexical functions, which offer an elegant way of describing these relationships. Previous work has shown that using lexical functions in the context of multilingual natural language generation allows for a more efficient development of linguistic resources. We propose a way to encode lexical functions in the Lexical Functional Grammar framework.