Multilingual Natural Language Generation for Multilingual Software: A Functional Linguistic Approach

In this paper we present an implemented account of multilingual linguistic resources for multilingual text generation that improves significantly on the degree of re-use of resources both across languages and across applications. We argue that this is a necessary step for multilingual generation in order to reduce the high cost of constructing linguistic resources and to make NLG relevant for a wider range of applications—particularly, in this paper, for multilingual software and user interfaces. We begin by contrasting both a weak and a strong approach to multilinguality in the state of the art in multilingual text generation. Neither approach has provided sufficient principles for organizing multilingual work. We then introduce our framework where multilingual variation is included as an intrinsic feature of all levels of representation. We provide an example of multilingual tactical generation using this approach and discuss some of the performance, maintenance and development issues that arise.