Controlling Logical Scope in Text Generation

Many applications of Natural Language Generation employ object-oriented knowledge representation formalisms such as loom. Each entity in the domain is represented by an object belonging to a speciied class and possessing attributes suitable for that class. From a logical viewpoint, domain entities correspond to existentially quantiied variables, but since loom and kindred formalisms provide no scop-ing mechanisms, it has to be assumed that all variables have wide scope. For technical material including conditional, negative or modal contexts this is a serious limitation. We suggest a simple extensions to standard object-oriented formalisms which allow encoding of logical scope, and show how logically complex material can be edited using thèwysiwym' approach .