Combining multiple, large-scale resources in a reusable lexicon for natural language generation

A lexicon is an essential component in a generation system but few efforts have been made to build a rich, large-scale lexicon and make it reusable for different generation applications. In this paper, we describe our work to build such a lexicon by combining multiple, heterogeneous linguistic resources which have been developed for other purposes. Novel transformation and integration of resources is required to reuse them for generation. We also applied the lexicon to the lexical choice and realization component of a practical generation application by using a multi-level feedback architecture. The integration of the lexicon and the architecture is able to effectively improve the system paraphrasing power, minimize the chance of grammatical errors, and simplify the development process substantially