<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="W94-0310">
  <Title>On the Creative Use of Language: the Form of Lexical Resources</Title>
  <Section position="7" start_page="86" end_page="87" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
9. Summary
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> We have made a rational reconstruction of an actually attested utterance that exhibited what appears to us to have been a completely new pattern of semantic types, making it an instance of what we have called referential creativity. We have used this reconstruction to illustrate our design for an incremental content selection process. This process selects conceptual entities or 'units of information' from a region of the speaker's situation that is established at the moment she decides to say something, what we call the Relevant Portion of the Situation. Simultaneous with a unit's selection is its assignment to a location in the text plan as it exists up to that point and the determination of the linguistic resource to which it is to be mapped. The text plan is Meteer's Text Structure level of representation--the level at which units must be shown to be expressiblemand consequently there is a constraint on the selection process that the mapping chosen must be consistent with the syntactico-semantic constraints of the target location.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Since judging the consequences of a choice of realization could involve a great deal of linguistic reasoning if the vocabulary in which the choice was deliberated were too detailed or too dependent on facts about surface syntax, we base the decisions on abstract representations of the facts in a unit's lexical entry, the Lexical-Conceptual Paradigms of Generative Lexicon theory, instead of on the entries themselves. In addition, we draw on GL's qualia structure representation of a word's meaning to indicate when a phrase will communicate more information than it appears to do looking just at its surface content. This permits the selection of units that would otherwise be inconsistent with the Text Structure location to which they are assigned, resulting in the need for the listener to do what GL calls 'type coercion' to recover the meaning that the phrase is intended to indicate. We noted that in cases like this, the omission of explicit information creates a cohesive link to the situation in which the utterance occurs, thus reinforcing the integrity of the text as a semantic unit.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Our work suffers from the lack of a real, implemented machine speaker that could be in real situations, have real intentions that lead to the identification of an RPS, and thereby provide a real check on whether the kinds of linkages of units that we have posited are coherent in a system that has more to do than just produce texts. We have accepted this limitation because it is the only way that we could look at language as it is really used by people, and with that be able to investigate a process whose complexity, we believe, is commensurate with what is happening in people's minds.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Indeed, the only realistic reason to propose an incremental processing architecture like this one is to formulate hypotheses about the nature of language processing by people, not machines. If the goal were simply to have computers produce the best possible texts to fit the content, then we would surely use multi-pass,</Paragraph>
    <Section position="1" start_page="87" end_page="87" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
7th International Generation Workshop * Kennebunkport, Maine * June 21-24, 1994
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> revision-driven architectures such as the one developed by Gabriel (1981, 1988), which, after all, passed the ultimate test of a machine generation system by writing three paragraphs that were folded into the exposition in the journal article about the system and were completely undetectable as machine-text.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1"> As a hypothesis about people, an architecture should offer some explanation for phenomena that we can observe, and should make predictions about aspects that we had not thought to look for before. We have seen the first signs of such explanations when we looked closely at the contexts that led to referential creativity. For example, had the utterance about the amount of snow been based on a different phrasing for the temporal adjunct, then a normal realization would have been possible: (13) &amp;quot;'...it will stay clean until there are a couple inches of snow on it.&amp;quot; Similarly, if example 1 had not involved the fixed phrase &amp;quot;before or after&amp;quot; then a normal realization of the whole event would have been available as discussed earlier.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="2"> We expect that in part it is the difficulties that such phrasal choices create for the expressibility of the normal following content that contribute to the recourse to referentially creative utterances, where the difficulties no doubt combine ~vith the centrality and salience of the typeinappropriate unit to make the unit more available in the RPS than it might otherwise be.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="3"> This suggests that referential creativity is an escape route from a context in Text Structure that would otherwise block any content from being selected. As a hypothesis about human processing, this may be testable through a close examination of a class of speech errors, a known to be fruitful source of insight into human processing (Levelt 1989, Garrett 1980). This class is the pattern of 'block and restart' errors that are so common, even ubiquitous, in casual unpracticed speech that we accept them just part of the process of talking and don't even think of them as &amp;quot;errors&amp;quot;. Here, for example, is such a block and restart transcribed off the radio during an interview. The person is speaking about the flooding in Mississippi and how people are dealing with it: (14) &amp;quot;Some of these emergency workers have not had a// have not been to bed for three days.&amp;quot; If we allow ourselves to speculate about what this person might have said had he continued at the point of the &amp;quot;//&amp;quot; rather than restarting, a likely possibility is that he would have said that the workers had not had &amp;quot;a nap&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;a chance to sleep&amp;quot;. This possible content is high frequency locution, just like the phrase &amp;quot;before or after&amp;quot;, but it probably does not fit the facts of the situation. That is, we speculate that the intended completion was &amp;quot;have not had a nap in three days&amp;quot;.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="4"> We expect that it may be very often be the case that a block and restart occurs because the content unit just before the block, the last one said or partially said (given that the process overall is a pipeline and the speaker can be expected to appreciate a failure of expressibility at an early stage), a high frequency standard phrasing, creates a context in which the next unit to be said cannot be expressed. Then, if there is no high salience, situationally cohesive unit available in the RPS that might implicitly convey the information and allow the the speaker to make a referentially creative choice, then the speaker will have no alternative other than aborting their plan and starting anew. If such an account for block and restart errors proves fruitful it will provide empirical support for the design of the content selection process that we have described in this paper.</Paragraph>
    </Section>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>