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Sentence generation will be an integral part of future augmentative communication devices. By employing natural language processing techniques, we hope to enhance the speed, flexibility, and ease of use of current word-based systems. In this paper, we discuss the generation component of our “compansion” system, which expands compressed messages entered by the user into full English sentences. The two phases of this component are (1) the translator, which converts a semantic representation of the message into a syntactic “deep structure” representation and (2) the generator, which takes this “deep structure” and uses a functional unification grammar to produce a complete English sentence. Because of this modular design, the generator is independent of whatever semantic representation is used; thus, it could be easily adapted to other systems (e.g., sign language translation) through the use of a different translator. Introduction Sentence generation will be an important component of many communication aids in the future. For instance, it is one component of a system which takes compressed input from the user and generates full well-formed sentences, it could be used in translation devices (e.g., ASL to English), it could be used by a system which improves written English by parsing the writer's prose and then generating better formed sentences when necessary. In this paper we describe one such generator which is currently used in the “compansion project” at the Applied Science and Engineering Laboratories at the University of Delaware and the AI DuPont Institute. The goal of the project is to allow the disabled individual to input a compressed message containing the content words of his/her intended utterance. The system will take this input, generate a semantic representation using natural language understanding techniques, and eventually generate a well-formed English sentence. A sentence generator must take a semantic representation of an utterance which is independent of any particular natural language (e.g., English) and translate this representation into an English sentence. We have broken the process into two phases. In the first phase (the translator) the elements in the semantic representation will be replaced by their language specific instantiations. In the second phase (the generator) a grammar of English syntax will be used to order the sentence elements and add proper word endings and syntactic elements so as to output a legal English sentence. In this paper we focus on the generator phase, adding reference to the translator phase in order to point out its novel features. © 1989 RESNA Press. Reprinted with permission.