The Generation of French from a Semantic Representation. AIM-212

The report contains first a brief description of Preference Semantics, a system
of representation and analysis of the meaning structure of natural language. The
analysis algorithm which transforms phrases into semantic items called templates
has been considered in detail elsewhere, so this report concentrates on the
second phase of analysis, which binds templates together into a higher level
semantic block corresponding to an English paragraph, and which, in operation,
interlocks with the French generation procedure. During this phase, the semantic
relations between templates are extracted, pronouns are referred and those word
disambiguations are done that require the context of a whole paragraph. These
tasks require items called PARAPLATES which are attached to keywords such as
prepositions, subjunctions and relative pronouns. The system chooses the
representation which maximizes a carefully defined "semantic density".

A system for the generation of French sentences is described, based on the
generation of French sentences is described, based on the recursive evaluation
of procedural generation patterns called STEREOTYPES. The stereotypes are
semantically context sensitive, are attached to each sense of English words
and keywords and are carried into the representation by the analysis procedure.
The representation of the meaning of words, and the versatility of the
stereotype format, allow for fine meaning distinctions to appear in the French,
and for the construction of French differing radically from the English origin.