Genaralized Augmented Transition Network Grammars For Generation From Semantic Networks

Augmented transition network (ATN) grammars have, since their development by Woods [ 7; ~, become the most used method of describing grammars for natural language understanding end question answering systems. The advantages of the ATN notation have been su,naarized as "I) perspicuity, 2) generative power, 3) efficiency of representation, 4) the ability to capture linguistic regularities and generalities, and 5) efficiency of operation., [ I ,p.191 ]. The usual method of utilizing an ATN grammar in a natural language system is to provide an interpreter which can take any ATH graam~ar, a lexicon, and a sentence as data and produce either a parse of a sentence or a message that the sentence does not conform to the granunar. A compiler has been written [2;3 ] which takes an ATH grammar as input and produces a specialized parser for that grammar, but in this paper we will presume that an Interpreter is being used.