We present an Augmented Template-Based approach to text realization that addresses the requirements of real-time, interactive systems such as a dialog system or an intelligent tutoring system. Template-based approaches are easier to implement and use than traditional approaches to text realization. They can also generate texts more quickly. However traditional template-based approaches with rigid templates are inflexible and difficult to reuse. Our approach augments traditional template-based approaches by adding several types of declarative control expressions and an attribute grammar-based mechanism for processing missing or inconsistent slot fillers. Therefore, augmented templates can be made more general than traditional ones, yielding templates that are more flexible and reusable across applications.
We present a new approach to enriching underspecified representations of content to be realized as text. Our approach uses an attribute grammar to propagate missing information where needed in a tree that represents the text to be realized. This declaratively-specified grammar mediates between application-produced output and the input to a generation system and, as a consequence, can easily augment an existing generation system. Endapplications that use this approach can produce high quality text without a fine-grained specification of the text to be realized, thereby reducing the burden to the application. Additionally, representations used by the generator are compact, because values that can be constructed from the constraints encoded by the grammar will be propagated where necessary. This approach is more flexible than defaulting or making a statistically good choice because it can deal with long-distance dependencies (such as gaps and reflexive pronouns). Our approach differs from other approaches that use attribute grammars in that we use the grammar to enrich the representations of the content to be realized, rather than to generate the text itself. We illustrate the approach with examples from our template-based textrealizer, YAG.
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