Book Reviews: Incremental Conceptualization for Language Production by Markus Guhe

For the past ten years or more, most work in the field of Natural Language Generation (NLG) has shied away from considerations regarding the processes underlying human language production. Rather, the focus has been on systems that automatically produce language—usually text—from non-linguistic representations, with the main objective being generation of a text that faithfully captures the meaning of those nonlinguistic representations (see, e.g., Reiter and Dale’s 2000 textbook on NLG). There is, however, also a different take on NLG “as not just competent performance by a computer but the development of a computational theory of the human capacity for language and processes that engage it” (McDonald 1987, page 642). Guhe’s research monograph, based on his 2003 Ph.D. thesis, is firmly situated in the latter tradition. One of his main goals is to work out a computational architecture for Levelt’s (1989) psycholinguistically motivated model of language production. According to Levelt’s model, speaking involves three main activities: conceptualizing (deciding what to say), formulating (deciding how to say it), and articulating (saying it). Guhe’s book focuses on the mental activity of conceptualizing. Conceptualizing is a recalcitrant object of study, partly because of the problem of the “initial spark”; the decision to say something appears to be the result of volitional conscious decisions, which largely elude scientific study. Guhe avoids this problem by investigating conceptualization in settings where the main intention is already fixed: a speaker witnesses several events unfold and is instructed to describe what happens (while it happens). The research challenge then is to figure out how “subintentions” for individual speech acts come about. The benefit of using an on-line generation setting is that it provides information on both what a speaker says at a given point in time and what is being reported, that is, the data that drive the speaker’s utterances. The book consists of the usual preface and introduction, followed by four parts (A, B, C, and Results), a list of the book’s theses, and an appendix that includes, among other things, a glossary, bibliography, name index, and subject index. Part A of the book is titled “Conceptualization.” It starts with an introduction to the field of language production, with particular reference to Levelt’s (1989) model. The notion of conceptualization as a “quasi-module,” partly using Fodor’s (1983) criteria, is presented and four subtasks of conceptualization are discussed: