Conceptual Graphs for the Analysis and Generation of Sentences

A system for analyzing and generating Italian texts is under development at the IBM Rome Scientific Center. Detailed semantic knowledge on word-sense patterns is used to relate the linguistic structure of a sentence to a conceptue representation (a conceptual graph). Conceptual graphs are stored in a database and accessed by a natural-language query/answering module. The system analyzes a text supplied by a pressagency-release database. It consists of three modules: a morphological, a syntactic, and a semantic processor. The semantic analyzer uses a conceptual lexicon f word-sense descriptions, currently including about 850 entries. A description is an extended case frame providing the surface semantic patterns (SSP) of a word-sense w. SSPs express both semantic constraints and word-usage information, such as commonly found word patterns, idioms, and metaphoric expressions. SSPs are used by the semantic interpreter to build a conceptual graph of the sentence, which is then accessed by the query-answering and language-generation modules. This paper makes the claim that the