tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "WHAT NOT TO SAY"

A problem with most text production and language generation systems is that they tend to become rather verbose. This may be due to negleetion of the pragmatic factors involved in communication. In this paper, a text production system, COMMENTATOR, is described and taken as a starting point for a more general discussion of some problems in Computational Pragmatics. A new line of research is suggested, based on the concept of unification. | WHAT NOT TO SAY Jan Fornell Department of Linguistics 4 Phonetics Lund University Helgonabacken 12 Lund Sweden ABSTRACT A problem with most text production and language generation systems is that they tend to become rather verbose. This may be due to neglection of the pragmatic factors involved in communication. In this paper a text production system COMMENTATOR is described and taken as a starting point for a more general discussion of some problems in Computational Pragmatics. A new line of research is suggested based on the concept of unification. I COMMENTATOR A. The original model 1. General purpose The original version of Commentator was written in BASIC on a small micro computer. It was intended as a generator of text rather than just sentences but has in fact proved quite useful in a somewhat more general sense as a generator of linguistic problems and is often thought of as a linguistic research tool . The idea was to create a model that worked at all levels from raw data like perceptions and knowledge via syntactic semantic and pragmatic components to coherent text or speech in order to be able to study the various levels and the interaction between them at the same time. This means that the model is very narrow and vertical rather than like most other computational models which are usually characterized by huge databases at a single level of representation. 2. The model The system dynamically describes the movements and locations of a few objects on the computer screen. In one version two persons called Adam and Eve moving around in a yard with a gate and a tree. In another version some ships outside a harbour . The comments are presented in Swedish or English in a written and a spoken version simultaneously using a VOTRAX speech synthesis device . No real perceptive mechanism such as a video camera is included in the system instead it is fed the successive coordinates of the moving objects but otherwise all the other abovementioned components are .