Functional Descriptions as a Formalism for Linguistic Knowledge Representation in a Generation Oriented Approach

This paper describes how linguistic knowledge has been declaratively formalised using Functional Descriptions (FDs), in the generation module of the SAGE system. SAGE (Sentence Analysis and GEneration) is the Natural Language Frontend of the Dialogue Manager of the Esprit I project Esteam-316. The present implementation has the advantage of being based on two principles, which are the dynamic checking of constraints and the functional unification of knowledge and dynamic objects. In order to provide these functionalities to the former formalism of FD, we have introduce the notions of Syntactic Components and of Current Syntactic Component. The whole sentence is built step by step in a complex tree-like structure. The generation interpreter is able to move upward and downward inside this tree. In addition, our system validates the use of a Lexicon-Grammar (drawn from the LADL studies) for sentence-generation. The target language is English, but all of the knowledge bases have been developed in such a way that the generation process is able to support a change of language. Cap Sogeti Innovation tel: (33) -146 22 60 27 118, rue de Tocqueville fax (33) -1-42 67 41 39 75017 Paris, France 1 E-mail address: [email protected] 2 E-mail address: [email protected]