Sentence generation from conceptual graphs

Abstract

This paper describes a technique for translating the semantic information encoded in a conceptual graph into an English language sentence. The use of a non-hierarchically structured semantic representation (conceptual graphs) allows us to investigate a more general version of the sentence generation problem where one is not pre-committed to a choice of the syntactically prominent elements in the initial semantics. We show clearly how the semantic structure is declaratively related to linguistically motivated syntactic representation. Our technique provides flexibility to address cases where the entire input cannot be precisely expressed in a single sentence.