A functional approach to generation with TAG

Abstract

It has been hypothesized that Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG) is particularly well suited for sentence generation. It is unclear, however, how a sentence generation system based on TAG should choose among the syntactic possibilities made available in the grammar. In this paper we consider the question of what needs to be done to generate with TAGs and explain a generation system that provides the necessary features. This approach is compared with other TAG-based generation systems. Particular attention is given to Mumble-86 which, like our system, makes syntactic choice on sophisticated functional grounds.