Demonstration of ILEX 3.0

We will demonstrate the ILEX system, a system which dynamically generates descriptions of database objects for the web, adapting the description to the discourse context and user type. Among other improvements in version 3, the system now generates from relational databases, and this demonstration will focus on this ability. We will also show how incremental extensions to the domain semantics improve the quality of the text produced. 1 Introduction ILEX is a tool for dynamic browsing of database-defined information: it allows a user to browse through the information in a database using hyper-text. ILEX generates descriptions of a database object on the fly, taking into account the user's context of browsing. For more information on ILEX, see Knott et al. (1997) and Mellish et al. (1998). The demonstration will consist of generating a series of texts, in each case adding in additional components of the domain semantics. This short paper should be read in conjunction with the full paper elsewhere in this volume. 2 Generating from Bare Data We start initially with a relational database, as defined by a set of tab-delimited database files, plus some minimal semantics. As discussed in the paper, we use assume a relational database to consist of two types of files: 1. Entity Files: each of which provides data for a particular entity type. Each row (or record) defines the attributes of a different entity. See figure 1. 2. Link Files: where a particular attribute may have multiple fillers, we use link files to define the entity-entity relations. See figure 2. To generate from these files, the dolnain-editor needs to provide two additional resources: 1. Data-type specification for each entity-file, a specification of what data-type the values in the ~ Material silver enamel gold Figure 2: A Sample from a Link file. 3. Domain Taxonomy: detailing the taxonomic organisation of the various classes of the entities. Mapping Domain taxonomy onto Upper Model: ILEX uses an Upper Model (a domain-independent semantic taxonomy, see Bateman (1990)), which supports the grammatical expression of entities, e.g., selection of pronoun, differentiation between mass and count entities, between things and qualities, etc. We require that the basic types in the domain taxonomy are mapped onto the upper model, to allow the entities to be grammaticalised and lexicalised appropriately. Several tricks are needed to generate without a specified domain semantics: Use of standard clause templates: lacking any knowledge of how different attributes …