Issues in word choice

This paper discusses word choice for natural language generation. It examines 11 issues, the solutions that have been proposed for them, and their implications for design. The issues are: o How are appropriate words chosen~ o How is conciseness ensured7 o When does choice stop? o How are patterns of lexicalization respected? o How are interactions among choices handled? o How are the correct parts of speech chosen? o How are words chosen to satisfy constituency? o What ensures that a word stands in the correct relation to its neighbors? o How is word order determined? o Are all words chosen in the same way? o In what order are the factors considered? This paper also discusses FIG, a generator which incorporates novel solutions to many of these issues. FIG violates common assumptions about the roles of modularity and grammar in generator design. Analysis of FIG leads to 4 Principles for generator design, as follows: o Have an explicit representation of the status of the generation process at each point in time. o Use a single, unified representation. o Do not rely on the details of the structure of the input. o Treat most choices as emergent. 1. Word Choice and Generator Design An important task in the generation of natural language is choosing words. This paper presents issues in word choice. A generator must handle these issues or risk producing output which is inappropriate, unnatural, confusing, unreadable, or ungrammatical. Choice has been called the key problem in natural language generation/McDonald 1983/. However, most research so far has focused on syntactic choice; word choice has received little attention/Pustejovsky and Nirenburg 1987/. This paper focuses on basic issues in word choice and their implications for generator design.