Linguist's Assistant: A Multi-Lingual Natural Language Generator based on Linguistic Universals, Typologies, and Primitives

Linguist’s Assistant (LA) is a large scale semantic analyzer and multi-lingual natural language generator designed and developed entirely from a linguist’s perspective. The system incorporates extensive typological, semantic, syntactic, and discourse research into its semantic representational system and its transfer and synthesizing grammars. LA has been tested with English, Korean, Kewa (Papua New Guinea), Jula (Cote d’Ivoure), and North Tanna (Vanuatu), and proof-of-concept lexicons and grammars have been developed for Spanish, Urdu, Tagalog, Chinantec (Mexico), and Angas (Nigeria). This paper will summarize the major components of the NLG system, and then present the results of experiments that were performed to determine the quality of the generated texts. The experiments indicate that when experienced mothertongue translators use the drafts generated by LA, their productivity is typically quadrupled without any loss of quality.