Generating a Sentence from a Thought

It is desirable for an intelligent program to communicate with humans using a natural language. We have recently developed a program to parse a sentence into a thought using a learned English grammar. Without learning a separate grammar, this paper discusses how we convert the learned grammatical structures into role structures. These role structures can then be used by our algorithm to generate a sentence that reflects the contents of a given thought. Roles define the purpose of grammar terms and link grammatical knowledge to semantic knowledge. Since this linkage separates semantics from grammatical structures completely, the thoughts used in generating a sentence only need to be logical thoughts. Consequently, the creator of a thought may define the thought’s content based simply on its semantics and not be concerned with the grammatical details of the natural