Using UTAGs for Incremental and Parallel Generation

Exploiting an incremental and parallel processing scheme is useful to improve the performance of natural language generation systems. TAG--GEN is a TAG--based syntactic generator that realizes both principles. It is shown how the demands of incremental and parallel generation influence the definition, the design, and the processing of syntactic rules on the basis of Tree Adjoining Grammars. Keywords Natural Language Generation, Incremental Processing, Tree Adjoining Grammar 1 Introduction The growing importance of natural language for human--computer interfaces motivates researchers in the field of artificial intelligence to search for methods that improve the performance of those systems. We developed the flexible and efficient syntactic generator TAG-- GEN as part of the text--generation module of the multi--modal presentation system WIP 1 (cf. [Wahlster et al. 92], [Wahlster et al. 93]). The design of TAG--GEN has been influenced by a number of goals (see [Kilger & Finkler 93])..