🚀 go-pugleaf

              The International Computer Science Institute
                     is pleased to present a talk:

                Wednesday, September 2, 1992  3:00 p.m.

                             MARK SELIGMAN
                      ATR Institute International
                       seligman@atr-la.atr.co.jp

                ``Generating Discourse from  Networks
                   Using an Inheritance-Based Grammar''

           The talk will have two parts: a brief  presentation  of
      dissertation  work,  and  an  informal discussion of machine
      translation  research  at  ATR  Institute  International  in
      Japan.

           The dissertation presents two separable designs: First,
      I  describe  an  inheritance-based  grammar which represents
      both syntactic and semantic  structures  as  frames.  (In  a
      departure  from  previous  designs, mapping structures which
      mediate between syntactic and semantic structures are frames
      as   well.)   While  stressing  representational  neutrality
      between text analysis and generation, I focus on the latter.
      The  approach to sentence generation features the merging of
      structures via inheritance and the  tracking  of  expressive
      choices using ``multiple  worlds''.  Second,  I  propose new
      semantic/pragmatic  representations   for   paragraph-length
      discourses,  and  expression  procedures  based  upon  them.
      Discourse relations are to be discovered  via  judgments  of
      synonymy,   and   are  arranged  in  lattices  (rather  than
      exclusively in hierarchies). A small set of network  traver-
      sal  strategies permits repeated application of the sentence
      grammar to generate paragraphs  expressing  the  whole  net.
      (These  include  a ``bottom-up'' generative  strategy, in in
      which  completed  fragments  are  incorporated  into  larger
      structures in  progress.) A facility for expressing ``situa-
      tional formulas'' adds a pragmatic component to  the system.
      Several variants are generated for two attested discourses.

           The MT work  involves  Japanese-English  and  Japanese-
      German  speech-to-speech  translation in a unification-based
      semantic transfer system.


        This talk will be held in the Main Lecture Hall at ICSI.
          1947 Center Street, Sixth Floor, Berkeley, CA 94704
       (On Center between Milvia and Martin Luther King Jr. Way)

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