A statistical, grammar-based approach to microplanning

C Gardent, L Perez-Beltrachini - Computational Linguistics, 2017 - direct.mit.edu
Computational Linguistics, 2017direct.mit.edu
Although there has been much work in recent years on data-driven natural language
generation, little attention has been paid to the fine-grained interactions that arise during
microplanning between aggregation, surface realization, and sentence segmentation. In this
article, we propose a hybrid symbolic/statistical approach to jointly model the constraints
regulating these interactions. Our approach integrates a small handwritten grammar, a
statistical hypertagger, and a surface realization algorithm. It is applied to the verbalization of …
Abstract
Although there has been much work in recent years on data-driven natural language generation, little attention has been paid to the fine-grained interactions that arise during microplanning between aggregation, surface realization, and sentence segmentation. In this article, we propose a hybrid symbolic/statistical approach to jointly model the constraints regulating these interactions. Our approach integrates a small handwritten grammar, a statistical hypertagger, and a surface realization algorithm. It is applied to the verbalization of knowledge base queries and tested on 13 knowledge bases to demonstrate domain independence. We evaluate our approach in several ways. A quantitative analysis shows that the hybrid approach outperforms a purely symbolic approach in terms of both speed and coverage. Results from a human study indicate that users find the output of this hybrid statistic/symbolic system more fluent than both a template-based and a purely symbolic grammar-based approach. Finally, we illustrate by means of examples that our approach can account for various factors impacting aggregation, sentence segmentation, and surface realization.
MIT Press
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