tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "A BASIS FOR A FORMALIZATION OF LINGUISTIC STYLE"

Style in language is more than just surface appeaxance, on the contrary, it is an essential part of the meaning conveyed by the writer. A computational theory of style could be of great use in many computational linguistics applications. A system that is 'stylistically aware' could analyze the writer's stylistic intent and understand the complex interaction of choices that produce a certain effect. In applications such as machine translation, a computational theory of stylistics would allow the preservation or modification of stylistic effects across languages. The theory would also be useful in computer-aided language instruction where, along with vocabulary. | A BASIS FOR A FORMALIZATION OF LINGUISTIC STYLE Stephen J. Green Department of Computer Science University of Waterloo Waterloo Ontario Canada N2L 3G1 INTRODUCTION Style in language is more than just surface appearance on the contrary it is an essential part of the meaning conveyed by the writer. A computational theory of style could be of great use in many computational linguistics applications. A system that is stylistically aware could analyze the writer s stylistic intent and understand the complex interaction of choices that produce a certain effect. In applications such as machine translation a computational theory of stylistics would allow the preservation or modification of stylistic effects across languages. The theory would also be useful in computer-aided language instruction where along with vocabulary and grammar the individual writing style of the student could be analyzed and amended. The work described in this paper will be incorporated into into the Nigel grammar of the Penman system to provide a fine degree of stylistic control in language generation. Drawing on both classical and contemporary rhetorical theory we view style as goal directed that is texts are written for a purpose and this purpose dictates the stylistic choices that must be made. We find a computational counterpart to this view in the work of Hovy 1988 who used style as one of the pragmatic factors controlling generation in his PAULINE system. More recently DiMarco 1990 the basis for this research attempted to codify many of the elements of style that had previously been defined only descriptively and informally. DiMarco presented a vocabulary of stylistic terms that was used to construct a syntactic stylistic grammar at three levels primitive elements abstract elements and stylistic goals. At the base level of the grammar the primitive elements describe the stylistic effects of individual sentence components. These primitive elements are then combined at a level of more abstract