Controlled Transformational Sentence Generation

This paper describes a sentence generator that was built primarily to focus on syntactic form and syntactic relationships. Our main goal was to produce a tutorial system for the English language; the intended users of the system are people with language delaying handicaps such as deafness, and people learning English as a foreign language. For these populations, extensive exposure to standard English constructions (negatives, questions, relatlvization, etc.) and their interactions is necessary. • The purpose of the generator was to serve as a powerful resource for tutorial programs that need examples of particular constructions and/or related sentences to embed in exercises or examples for the student. The focus of the generator is thus not so much on what to express as on how to express it in acceptable English. This is quite different from the focus of most other language generation systems. Nonetheless, our system could be interfaced to a more goal-directed semantic component.