Natural Language Generation with Abstract Machine

MACHINE Evgeniy Gabrilovich and Nissim Francez Shuly Wintner Computer Science Department Seminar fur Sprachwissenschaft Technion, Israel Institute of Technology Universitat Tubingen 32000 Haifa, Israel 72074 Tubingen, Germany fgabr,francezg@cs.technion.ac.il shuly@sfs.nphil.uni-tuebingen.de Abstract We present a system for Natural Language Generation based on an Abstract Machine approach. Our abstract machine operates on grammars encoded in a unification-based Typed Feature Structure formalism, and is capable of both generation and parsing. For efficient generation, grammars are first inverted to a suitable form, and then compiled into abstract machine instructions. A dual compiler translates the same input grammar into an abstract machine program for parsing. Both generation and parsing programs are executed under the same (chart-based) evaluation strategy. This results in an efficient, bidirectional (parsing/generation) system for Natural Language Processing. Moreover, the system ..