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Next: Further Research Up: Extensions Previous: Quantifier Storage

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Postponing Lexical Choice

As it stands, the generation algorithm chooses particular lexical forms on-line. This approach can lead to a certain amount of unnecessary nondeterminism. For instance, the choice of verb form might depend on syntactic features of the verb's subject available only after the subject has been generated. This nondeterminism can be eliminated by deferring lexical choice to a postprocess. The generator will yield a list of lexical items instead of a list of words. To this list a small phonological frontend is applied. BUG uses such a mechanism to eliminate much of the uninteresting nondeterminism in choice of word forms. Of course, the same mechanism could be added to any of the other generation techniques discussed to in this paper.

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Gertjan van Noord
Thu Nov 24 18:39:44 MET 1994