THE CURRENT STATUS OF THE PENMAN 
LANGUAGE GENERATION SYSTEM 
Eduard H. Hovy 
Information Sciences Institute 
of the University of Southern California 
4676 Admiralty Way 
Marina del Rey, CA 90292-6695 
Tel: 213-822-1511 
Email: HOVY~ISI.EDU 
Penman is one of the largest English language generation programs in the world. De- 
veloped mainly at ISI/USC, it is the result of over 15 person-years' work, and forms the 
core of an investigation of the computational aspects of the theories of Systemic Functional 
Linguistics. 
In the past year, the Penman project has undergone a number of changes. The program 
itself has been restructured into a software package and has been distributed to over 15 
sites worldwide (mostly to academic institutions). This involved the creation of a number 
of auxiliary software tools and the writing of over 600 pages of documentation. 
In addition, the project has entered into two collaborations that show great promise. 
The KOMET project at the IPSI Institute in West Germany (funded by the German Federal 
Government) is a new project with goals very similar to our own. In addition to funding 
some of our work, they are building a systemic grammar of German and are collaborating on 
our parsing research. The Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney, Australia, 
is the home of Systemic Linguistics and is coordinating the worldwide growth of various 
aspects of a grammar of English, which will be provided to us periodically to be incorporated 
into Penman. 
Current research is being pursued in three principal areas: parsing, text planning, and 
text variation control during generation. Dr. Bob Kasper is implementing the ability to per- 
form inference over disjunctions in the knowledge representation language Loom, prepara- 
tory to representing Penman's grammar in Loom and then linking his parser up to perform 
simultaneous semantic and syntactic parsing using subsumption classification as the central 
operation. Dr. Eduard Hovy is continuing work on the planning of coherent multisenten- 
tim and longer texts using plans based on a generalization of rhetorical relations and on 
schemas, aiming for the automatic production of such texts as multipage reports. Dr. John 
Bateman is working with others (in Germany and with Dr. C~cile Paris from ISI) on devel- 
oping methods of representing interpersonal and situational features in ways which facilitate 
the control of Penman to produce textual variations from single input, tailored to hearers' 
level of expertise. 
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