Taking Generation as Abduction Seriously

This paper introduces 'assumptions', one-sided mutual beliefs, to construct a bidirectional architecture incorporating Hobbs et al.'s abduction. The integration of deductive parsing and abductive semantic interpretation may provide a basis for a bidirectional architecture. However, the idea of cost, the principal mechanism in Hobbs et al.'s abduction, is not workable for generation because it simply amounts to the assumability of parts of logical forms for the purpose of interpretation. We introduce explicit `assumptions' attached to particular expressions so as not only to control generation, but also to lighten the burden of abduction. This paper also discusses implementation issues on the data structure and the generation algorithm.