The Linguistic Basis of Text Generation 
Laurence Danlos 
Laboratoire d'Automatique Documentaire et Linguistique 
Universite Paris 7 
2, Place Jussieur (Tour Centrale, 9 etage) 
F-75251 Paris Cedex 05, FRANCE 
This presentation was based on a book, The 
Linguistic Basis of Text Generation, 
recently published by Cambridge University 
Press (Cambridge, England, 1987) in the series 
Studies in Natural Language Processing spon- 
sored by the Association for Computational Lin- 
guistics. An abstract for the book follows. 
ABSTRACT 
This study presents an original and penetrat- 
ing analysis of the complex problems surround- 
ing the automatic generaton of natural language 
text. Laurence Danlos provides a valuable criti- 
cal review of current research in this important 
and increasingly active field, and goes on to 
describe a new theoretical model that is 
thoroughly grounded in linguistic principles. 
The model emphasizes the semantic, syntac- 
tic and lexical constraints that must be dealt 
with when establishing a relationship between 
meaning and form, and it is consideration of 
such linguistic constraints that determines 
Danlos' generation algorithm. The book con- 
cludes with a description of a generation system 
based on this algorithm which produces texts in 
several domains and also a system for the syn- 
thesis of spoken messages from semantic 
representations. 
The book is a significant addition to the 
literature on text generation~ and will be of par- 
ticular interest to all computational linguists 
and AI researchers who have wrestled with the 
problem of vocabulary selection. 
