Lexicalized Grammar and the Description of Motion Events

Abstract

In natural language generation, the use of a lexicalized grammar formalism and incremental syntactic and semantic processing places strong and specific constraints on the form and meaning of grammatical entries. These principles restrict which grammatical representations are possible and suggest examples an analyst can consult to decide among possibilities. We discuss and justify a number of such constraints, and describe how they inform the design of lexical entries for motion verbs. Our entries allow a generator to match the lexical choices found in a target corpus of action descriptions by assessing how the interpretation of a verb in context contributes towards the hearer's identification of the intended action. 1. Introduction This paper originates in a project of tailoring a natural language generation system called SPUD, for sentence planning using description (Stone & Doran, 1997), to generate instructions for action in a concrete domain. The desired behavior for the system i...