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Natural Language Generation (NLG) is the automatic generation of Natural Language (NL) by computer in order to meet communicative goals. One aim of NL processing (NLP) is to allow more natural communication with a computer and, since communication is a two-way process, a NL system should be able to produce as well as interpret NL text. This research concerns the design and implementation of a NLG module for the LOLITA system. LOLITA (Large scale, Object-based, Linguistic Interactor, Translator and Analyser) is a general purpose base NLP system which performs core NLP tasks and upon which prototype NL applications have been built. As part of this encompassing project, this research shares some of its properties and methodological assumptions: the LOLITA generator has been built following Natural Language Engineering principles uses LOLITA's SemNet representation as input and is implemented in the functional programming language Haskell. As in other generation systems the adopted solution utilises a two component architecture. However, in order to avoid problems which occur at the interface between traditional planning and realisation modules (known as the generation gap) the distribution of tasks between the planner and plan-realiser is different: the plan-realiser, in the absence of detailed planning instructions, must perform some tasks (such as the selection and ordering of content) which are more traditionally performed by a planner. This work largely concerns the development of the plan- realiser and its interface with the planner. Another aspect of the solution is the use of Abstract Transformations which act on the SemNet input before realisation leading to an increased ability for creating paraphrases. The research has lead to a practical working solution which has greatly increased the power of the LOLITA system. The research also investigates how NLG systems can be evaluated and the advantages and disadvantages of using a functional language for the generation task.

Managing Surface Ambiguity in the Generation of Referring Expressions (Imtiaz Hussain Khan) Most algorithms for the Generation of Referring Expressions tend to generate distinguishing descriptions at the semantic level, disregarding the ways in which surface issues can affect their quality. This thesis explores the role of surface ambiguities in referring expressions and how the risk of such ambiguities should be taken into account by an algorithm that generates referring expressions. This was done by focussing on the type of surface ambiguity which arises when adjectives occur in coordinated structures (as in the old men and women). The central idea is to use statistical information about lexical co-occurrence to estimate which interpretation of a phrase is most likely for human readers, and to avoid generating phrases where misunderstandings are likely. We develop specific hypotheses, and test them by running experiments with human participants. We found that the Word Sketches are a reliable source of information to predict the likelihood of a reading. The avoidance of misunderstandings is not the only issue to be dealt with in this thesis. Since the avoidance of misunderstandings might be achieved at the cost of very lengthy (or perhaps very disfluent) expressions, it is important to select an optimal expression (i.e., the expression which is preferred by most readers) from various alternatives available. Again, we develop specific hypotheses, and recorded human preferences in a forced-choice manner. We found that participants preferred clear (i.e., not likely to be misunderstood) expressions to unclear ones, but if several of the expressions were clear then brief expressions were preferred over their longer counterparts. The results of these empirical studies motivated the design of a GRE algorithm. The implemented algorithm builds a plural distinguishing description for the intended referents (if one exists), using words; applies transformation rules to the distinguishing description to construct a set of distinguishing descriptions that are logically equivalent. Each description in the set is realised as a corresponding English noun phrase (NP) using appropriate realisation rules; the most likely reading of each NP is determined. One NP is selected for output. A further experiment verifies that the kinds of expressions produced by the algorithm are optimal for readers: they are understood accurately and quickly by readers.

Lo Sau-Han Silvia. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 137-143). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Definition of a summary --- p.2 / Chapter 1.2 --- Definition of text summarization --- p.3 / Chapter 1.3 --- Previous work --- p.4 / Chapter 1.3.1 --- Extract-based text summarization --- p.5 / Chapter 1.3.2 --- Abstract-based text summarization --- p.8 / Chapter 1.3.3 --- Sophisticated text summarization --- p.9 / Chapter 1.4 --- Summarization evaluation methods --- p.10 / Chapter 1.4.1 --- Intrinsic evaluation --- p.10 / Chapter 1.4.2 --- Extrinsic evaluation --- p.11 / Chapter 1.4.3 --- The TIPSTER SUMMAC text summarization evaluation --- p.11 / Chapter 1.4.4 --- Text Summarization Challenge (TSC) --- p.13 / Chapter 1.5 --- Research contributions --- p.14 / Chapter 1.5.1 --- Text summarization based on thematic term approach --- p.14 / Chapter 1.5.2 --- Bilingual news summarization based on an event-driven approach --- p.15 / Chapter 1.6 --- Thesis organization --- p.16 / Chapter 2 --- Text Summarization based on a Thematic Term Approach --- p.17 / Chapter 2.1 --- System overview --- p.18 / Chapter 2.2 --- Document preprocessor --- p.20 / Chapter 2.2.1 --- English corpus --- p.20 / Chapter 2.2.2 --- English corpus preprocessor --- p.22 / Chapter 2.2.3 --- Chinese corpus --- p.23 / Chapter 2.2.4 --- Chinese corpus preprocessor --- p.24 / Chapter 2.3 --- Corpus thematic term extractor --- p.24 / Chapter 2.4 --- Article thematic term extractor --- p.26 / Chapter 2.5 --- Sentence score generator --- p.29 / Chapter 2.6 --- Chapter summary --- p.30 / Chapter 3 --- Evaluation for Summarization using the Thematic Term Ap- proach --- p.32 / Chapter 3.1 --- Content-based similarity measure --- p.33 / Chapter 3.2 --- Experiments using content-based similarity measure --- p.36 / Chapter 3.2.1 --- English corpus and parameter training --- p.36 / Chapter 3.2.2 --- Experimental results using content-based similarity mea- sure --- p.38 / Chapter 3.3 --- Average inverse rank (AIR) method --- p.59 / Chapter 3.4 --- Experiments using average inverse rank method --- p.60 / Chapter 3.4.1 --- Corpora and parameter training --- p.61 / Chapter 3.4.2 --- Experimental results using AIR method --- p.62 / Chapter 3.5 --- Comparison between the content-based similarity measure and the average inverse rank method --- p.69 / Chapter 3.6 --- Chapter summary --- p.73 / Chapter 4 --- Bilingual Event-Driven News Summarization --- p.74 / Chapter 4.1 --- Corpora --- p.75 / Chapter 4.2 --- Topic and event definitions --- p.76 / Chapter 4.3 --- Architecture of bilingual event-driven news summarization sys- tem --- p.77 / Chapter 4.4 --- Bilingual event-driven approach summarization --- p.80 / Chapter 4.4.1 --- Dictionary-based term translation applying on English news articles --- p.80 / Chapter 4.4.2 --- Preprocessing for Chinese news articles --- p.89 / Chapter 4.4.3 --- Event clusters generation --- p.89 / Chapter 4.4.4 --- Cluster selection and summary generation --- p.96 / Chapter 4.5 --- Evaluation for summarization based on event-driven approach --- p.101 / Chapter 4.6 --- Experimental results on event-driven summarization --- p.103 / Chapter 4.6.1 --- Experimental settings --- p.103 / Chapter 4.6.2 --- Results and analysis --- p.105 / Chapter 4.7 --- Chapter summary --- p.113 / Chapter 5 --- Applying Event-Driven Summarization to a Parallel Corpus --- p.114 / Chapter 5.1 --- Parallel corpus --- p.115 / Chapter 5.2 --- Parallel documents preparation --- p.116 / Chapter 5.3 --- Evaluation methods for the event-driven summaries generated from the parallel corpus --- p.118 / Chapter 5.4 --- Experimental results and analysis --- p.121 / Chapter 5.4.1 --- Experimental settings --- p.121 / Chapter 5.4.2 --- Results and analysis --- p.123 / Chapter 5.5 --- Chapter summary --- p.132 / Chapter 6 --- Conclusions and Future Work --- p.133 / Chapter 6.1 --- Conclusions --- p.133 / Chapter 6.2 --- Future work --- p.135 / Bibliography --- p.137 / Chapter A --- English Stop Word List --- p.144 / Chapter B --- Chinese Stop Word List --- p.149 / Chapter C --- Event List Items on the Corpora --- p.151 / Chapter C.1 --- "Event list items for the topic ""Upcoming Philippine election""" --- p.151 / Chapter C.2 --- "Event list items for the topic ""German train derail"" " --- p.153 / Chapter C.3 --- "Event list items for the topic ""Electronic service delivery (ESD) scheme"" " --- p.154 / Chapter D --- The sample of an English article (9505001.xml). --- p.156

Wang Fu Lee. / "August 2003." / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 256-281). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese.

<p>This thesis examines the intonation patterns of Modern Greek with regard to different interpretations of the sentence types (declarative, interrogative, imperative).</p><p>14 utterances are produced by Greek native speakers (2 men and 2 women) so as to express various speech acts: STATEMENT, QUESTION, COMMAND and REQUEST.</p><p>The acquisition of the F0 curve for each utterance by means of the Wavesurfer tool leads to an analysis of the pitch movements and their alignments.</p><p>After the F0 curves are analyzed and illustrated using the Excel program we are able to compare and group them. Thus, we come up with 5 different intonation patterns. After a second-level comparison based on the fact that some of the F0 curves were similar but they differed only as far as the final pitch movement is concerned, we ended up with 3 fundamental categories of intonation patterns: Category I whose main feature is the rising pitch movement aligned to the onset of the stressed syllables. This category includes only sentences that denote Statement so we can call it the STATEMENT category. Category II’s main characteristic is a dipping pitch movement aligned to the head of the utterance that is the stress of the verb or a particle that signifies negation (/min/, /den/). Sentences meaning Command or Request belong to this category. Lastly, Category III’s intonation pattern consists of peaking pitch movements aligned to the initial and final stressed syllables. Interrogative sentences belong to this category no matter their interpretation.</p><p>A secondary goal of the thesis is to examine to which extent intonation can be a safe criterion for the “correct” interpretation of a sentence. A de facto presumption that since the ratio between the number of utterances (14) and the different intonation patterns (5) is not 1:1 there can always be misunderstandings among speakers, is basically verified by the results of our perception test conducted to Greek native speakers: Greek native speakers were able to identify most of the speech acts that were expressed by the most common (default) sentence type (i.e. imperative sentence for COMMAND and interrogative for QUESTION) however there were combinations that they had difficulties to identify, such as interrogative sentences that were denoting other than QUESTION, e.g. REQUEST or STATEMENT.Ending, a perception test conducted to Flemish speakers (subjects that were native speakers of another language than Greek) showed that they were more successful in sentences that meant STATEMENT and QUESTION but they could hardly identify an interrogative sentence that meant other than QUESTION and they also confused between COMMAND and REQUEST. This implies that the intonation used to convey different interpretations is basically language-dependent.</p><p>Concluding, this study offers a description of the intonation patterns (based on pitch movements) regarding the 3 sentence types with 4 different interpretations. Our findings prove that the intonation for some cases (i.e. for sentences that express COMMAND or STATEMENT) seems to be structure-independent and for others structure-dependent (cf. the interrogative sentences). Additionally, the fact that the negation can play an important role for the choice of intonation pattern (as shown for the case of COMMAND and STATEMENT) could be considered as a structure-dependent feature of intonation. This approach contrasts the approach used for many years in the traditional Grammar according to which the structure alone (sentence type) defines the meaning that is to be conveyed.</p>

published_or_final_version / Computer Science / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy