Syntactic-Head-Driven Generation

Abstract

The previously proposed semantic-head-driven generation methods run into problems if none of the daughter constituents in the syntacto-semantic rule schemata of a grammar fits the definition of a semantic head given in Shieber et al. 1990. This is the case for the semantic analysis rules of certain constraint-based semantic representations, e.g. Underspecified Discourse Representation Structures (UDRSs) (Frank/Reyle 1992). Since head-driven generation in general has its merits, we simply return to a syntactic definition of `head' and demonstrate the feasibility of syntactic-head-driven generation. In addition to its generality, a syntactic-head-driven algorithm provides a basis for a logically well-defined treatment of the movement of (syntactic) heads, for which only ad-hoc solutions existed, so far.