Microplanning with Communicative Intentions: The SPUD System

Abstract

The process of microplanning encompasses a range of problems in Natural Language Generation (NLG), such as referring expression generation, lexical choice, and aggregation, problems in which a generator must bridge underlying domain-specific representations and general linguistic representations. In this paper, we describe a uniform approach to microplanning based on declarative representations of a generator's communicative intent. These representations describe the results of NLG: communicative intent associates the concrete linguistic structure planned by the generator with inferences that show how the meaning of that structure communicates needed information about some application domain in the current discourse context. Our approach, implemented in the SPUD (sentence planning using description) microplanner, uses the lexicalized tree-adjoining grammar formalism (LTAG) to connect structure to meaning and uses modal logic programming to connect meaning to context. At the same time, communicative intent representations provide a resource for the process of NLG. Using representations of communicative intent, a generator can augment the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of an incomplete sentence simultaneously, and can assess its progress on the various problems of microplanning incrementally. The declarative formulation of communicative intent translates into a well-defined methodology for designing grammatical and conceptual resources which the generator can use to achieve desired microplanning behavior in a specified domain.