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<Paper uid="W97-1501">
  <Title>Some apparently disjoint aims and requirements for grammar development environments: the case of natural language generation</Title>
  <Section position="5" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
4 Discussion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The basic premises of a generation-oriented GDE such as KPML differ in certain respects to those those of an analysis-oriented GDE such as ALEP. This also stretches to the style of interaction with the system.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> For example, interaction with the KPML GDE is, as with Smalltalk and ALEP, object-oriented but, in contrast to ALEP, the objects to which a user has access are strongly restricted to just those linguistic constructs that are relevant for generation. This separates development environment details from the resources that are being developed. This is, of course, both possible and desirable because KPML is not intended to be tailored for particular types of resource by the user: the theoretical orientation is fixed.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The benefits of this approach seem to far outweigh the apparent limitations. First, the visualizations provided are exactly tailored to the details of the linguistic objects supported and their use in generation. Thus resource sets, networks, systems (disjunctions), semantic choice experts, dynamic traversal of the network, syntactic structures, etc. all have their own distinctive graphical representations: this establishes a clear modularity in the conception of the user that is easily obscured when a single more generation representation style (e.g., feature structure presented in a feature structure editor) is used for a wide range of information. This clarifies the difference in information modules and thus helps development. It is then also possible to 'fold' generation decisions into the visualizations in a natural way: thus supporting the 'result focusing' mode of development described above. Thus, whenever resources are inspected, their use during selected cycles of generation is also displayed by highlighting or annotating the appropriate objects shown.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> This also influences the kind of user for which the GDE is appropriate. The central areas in generation are still primarily functional and pragmatic rather than structural and syntactic. It is less common that linguists and developers concerned with pragmatics and text linguistics are fully comfortable with constraint logic programming. The dedicated graphical presentation of linguistic objects provided in KPML appears to provide a more generally accessible tool for constructing linguistic descriptions. Grammar components have been written using KPML by computer scientists without training in computational linguistics, by functional text linguists, by translators and technical writers, as well as by computational and systemic-functional linguists.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Finally, however, the well understood relationship between systemic-functional style descriptions and, for example, typed feature representations provides a bridge from the less formal, more functional style of description back to the kind of representations found in NLA-oriented GDE's. It is therefore to be expected that a broader range of linguistic input and development work will be encouraged to feed into large-scale resource development than would be possible if the kind of development were limited to that practised for purposes of analysis.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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