Some apparently disjoint aims and requirements for grammar development environments: the case of natural language generation

Abstract

Grammar development environments (GDE's) for analysis and for generation have not yet come together. Despite the fact that analysis-oriented GDE's (such as ALEP) may include some possibility of sentence generation, the development techniques and kinds of resources suggested are apparently not those required for practical, large-scale natural language generation work. Indeed, there is no use of `standard' (i.e., analysis-oriented) GDE's in current projects/applications targetting the generation of fluent, coherent texts. This unsatisfactory situation requires some analysis and explanation, which this paper attempts using as an example an extensive GDE for generation. The support provided for distributed large-scale grammar development, multilinguality, and resource maintenance are discussed and contrasted with analysis-oriented approaches.