Multilingual resource sharing across both related and unrelated languages: an implemented, open-source framework for practical natural language generation

This article reports on our experience with developing multilingual grammar resources for natural language generation. We employ a strong notion of multilinguality: (i) Grammars for different languages share their overall organization, as well as those descriptions that reflect similarities between languages, and (ii) a single realization engine is used to generate with these grammars. This strong notion arises from the functionalist approach we adopt: We hypothesize that languages are likely to share communicative functions, despite possibly differing in how these functions are realized. We discuss the advantages of this view in the development of large-coverage generation grammars for a broad variety of languages.