Natural Language Generation and Parsing as Heuristic Planning Problems

Abstract

This paper formulates the problems of natural language generation and parsing as particular instances of the classical planning problem. It assumes the existence of a Categorial Grammar lexicon from which the preconditions and effects of available actions are obtained. A declarative formalization of heuristics for action selection is used to guide the search for solutions. Heuristics for mapping formulas in the description logic DL-Lite (R,and) into English sentences and backwards, and examples of application to Human Robot Interaction (HRI) are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the approach.