Constraints on the Generation of Tense, Aspect, and Connecting Words from Temporal Expressions
Constraints on the Generation of Tense, Aspect, and Connecting Words from Temporal Expressions
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Date
2002-08-30
Authors
Dorr, Bonnie J.
Gaasterland, Terry
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Abstract
Generating language that reflects the temporal organization
of represented knowledge requires a language generation model that
integrates contemporary theories of tense and aspect, temporal
representations, and methods to plan text. This paper presents a
model that produces event combinations and appropriate connecting
words to relate them. We distinguish between inherent and
non-inherent aspectual features of verbs and describe an algorithm
that uses these features to select tense, aspect, and temporal
connecting words for generating text based on time-stamped
information. The main result of this work is the successful
incorporation of constrained linguistic theories of tense and aspect
in a self-contained module called CONGEN that produces a ranked list
of temporal connectives and tense/aspect possibilities from pairs of
time-stamped literals. We show that the theoretical results described
herein have been verified in a large-scale corpus analysis. The
framework serves as the basis of a component designed to enhance the
English output of a constrained generation system.
(LAMP-TR-091)
(UMIACS-TR-2002-71)