Multilingual text generation from structured formal representations

Abstract

This thesis aims to identify the optimal ways in which natural language generation techniques can be brought to bear upon the problem of processing a structured body of information in order to devise a coherent presentation of text content in multiple languages. We investigate how chains of referential expressions are realized in English, Swedish and Hebrew, and suggest several coreference strategies that can be used to generate coherent descriptions about paintings. The suggested strategies focus on the need to produce paragraphsized written natural language descriptions from formal structured representations presented in the Semantic Web. We account for principles of coreference by introducing a new modularized approach to automatically generate chains of referential expressions from ontologies. We demonstrate the feasibility of the approach by implementing a system where a Semantic Web domain ontology serves as the background knowledge representation and where the language-specific coreference strategies are incorporated. The system uses both the principles of discourse structures and coreference strategies to guide the generation process. We show how the system successfully generates coherent, well-formed descriptions in multiple languages.