A Functional Approach to Generation with TAG

Kathleen F. McCoy, K. Vijay-Shanker, & Gijoo Yang
Department of Computer and Information Sciences
University of Delaware
Newark, Delaware 19716, USA
email: mccoy@udel.edu, vijay@udel.edu

Abstract

It has been hypothesized that Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG) is
particularly well suited for sentence generation.  It is unclear,
however, how a sentence generation system based on TAG should choose
among the syntactic possibilities made available in the grammar.  In
this paper we consider the question of what needs to be done to
generate with TAGs and explain a generation system that provides the
necessary features.  This approach is compared with other TAG-based
generation systems.  Particular attention is given to Mumble-86 which,
like our system, makes syntactic choice on sophisticated functional
grounds.