Integrating a large-scale, reusable lexicon with a natural language generator

Abstract

This paper presents the integration of a large-scale, reusable lexicon for generation with the FUF/SURGE unification-based syntactic realizer. The lexicon was combined from multiple existing resources in a semi-automatic process. The integration is a multi-step unification process. This integration allows the reuse of lexical, syntactic, and semantic knowledge encoded in the lexicon in the development of lexical chooser module in a generation system. The lexicon also brings other benefits to a generation system: for example, the ability to generate many lexical and syntactic paraphrases and the ability to avoid non-grammatical output.