TR-IT-0260 :1998.03

Julia E. Heine

Repair Strategies for German Generation in TDMT - Problems and Prospects -

Abstract:The TDMT generation component has as its input a list of words grouped and annotated with the help of linguistic markers. These linguistic markers in general indicate the grammatical function of the respective words, and in theory the task of generation is reduced to inflection and grammatical ordering of the output. However, the linguistic markers are assigned somewhat mathematically by rules selected on the basis of semantic closeness calculations, often resulting in erroneous structure predictions. To improve the output quality, it would be desirable to have some form of repair strategies for ill-formed input to the generation component, restructering the information given in a sensible way. As it turns out, this task is not easily achieved without being more careful about the choice of linguistic markers in the transfer component, since the current inconsistencies, irrelevant as they are in the present system, lead to a lot of over-generation even with simple repair strategies. In this paper I will present some ideas on methods for repair, and why and how they will or will not work, given appropriate input from the transfer component. I will suggest a few changes to the information encoded in the linguistic markers during transfer, providing more structural information to base the repair strategies on, and thus avoiding most causes for over-generation.