Text planning with opportunistic control

Abstract

This report describes the current state of our central research thrust in the area of natural language generation. We have already reported on our text-level theory of lexical selection in natural language generation ([59, 60]), on a unification-based syntactic processor for syntactic generation ([73]) and designed a relatively flexible blackboard-oriented architecture for integrating these and other types of processing activities in generation ([60]). We have implemented these ideas in our prototype generator, Diogenes — a DIstributed, Opportunistic GENEration System — and tested our lexical selection and syntactic generation modules in a comprehensive natural language processing project — the KBMT-89 machine translation system ([15]). At this stage we are developing a more comprehensive Diogenes system, concentrating on both the theoretical and the system-building aspects of a) formulating a more comprehensive theory of distributed natural language generation; b) extending current theories of text organization as they pertain to the task of planning natural language texts; c) improving and extending the knowledge representation and the actual body of background knowledge (both domain and discourse/pragmatic) required for comprehensive text planning; d) designing and implementing algorithms for dynamic realization of text structure and integrating them into the blackboard style of communication and control; e) designing and implementing control algorithms for distributed text planning and realization. In this document we describe our ideas concerning opportunistic control for a natural language generation planner and present a research and development plan for the Diogenes project.