Syntactic Dependence and the Computer Generation of Coherent Discourse

Abstract

An experiment in the computer generation of coherent discourse was successfully conducted to test a hypothesis about the transitive nature of syntactic dependency relations among elements of the English language. The two primary components of the experimental computer program consisted of a phrase structure generation grammar capable of generating grammatical nonsense, and a monitoring system which would abort the generation process whenever it was apparent that the dependency structure of a sentence being generated was not in harmony with the dependency relations existing in an input source text. The final outputs of the system were coherent paraphrases of the source text. An implication of the hypothesis is that certain types of dependency relations are invariant under a variety of linguistic transformations. Potential applications include automatic kernelizing, question answering, automatic essay writing, and automatic abstracting systems. The question of the validity of transitive dependency models for languages other than English should be explored.