Overview Of GBGEN

This paper presents an overview of the GBGen system, a sentence realizer currently developped for French. The system is strictly deterministic, i.e. it maps semantic structures to surface forms without either simulating parallelism or using backtracking, and the performances are accordingly extremely satisfying. It is procedural, based on Government & Binding Theory (Chomsky 1981): several levels of syntactic representation are defined, on which configurational searches and transformations apply. GBGen is large-scale, based on a lexicon of approximately 185.000 entries (more or less 24.000 lexemes together with inflected word forms). The system covers simple and complex sentences, complex grammatical phenomena like unbounded dependencies, raising and control structures, intrasentential coreference, cliticization , modifiers (both clausal and prepositional) and main cases of coordination. It also computes Several morphosyntactic phenomena hke agreement, contractions or pronoun lexicalization. In what follows, we present the general characteristics of the software and detailits majors components.