The Penman Language Generation Project

The natural language sentence generation program Penman provides computational technology for generating English sentences and paragraphs, starting with input specifications of a non-linguistic kind. The research goals underlying Penman are threefold: to provide a useful and theoretically motivated resource for other research and development groups and the computational community at large, to provide a framework in which to conduct investigations into the nature of language, and eventually to provide a text generation system that can be used routinely by system developers. Penman is being used by computer scientists (as the output medium of their programs, among others projects in human-compu te r communication, expert system explanation, and interface design) and by linguists (as a reference and research tool).