Lexical Options in Multilingual Generationfrom a Knowledge

From the viewpoint of multilingual generation, the common underlying knowledge base should be kept clear of language-speciic concepts. This goal presupposes that lexical items of various languages cannot map one-to-one onto concepts all the time. We propose a more exi-ble way of attaching lexical items to conngurations of concepts and roles, and a lexical option nder that determines the set of content words that cover pieces of the message to be expressed, thereby performing the rst half of the \chunking" task (dividing the message into separately verbal-izable parts). This pool of lexical options will also include synonyms and near-synonyms: items with identical denotation, that is semantic representation in the KB, but diierent connotational characteristics. From this set, the subsequent steps of the generation process can select the most preferred subset for expressing the message.