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<Paper uid="P84-1077">
  <Title>Semantic Rule Based Text Generation</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1. Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Transformational text generators have traditionally emphasized syntactic processing. One example is Bates ILIAD system which is based on Chomsky's theory of transformational generative grammar \[1\]. Another is Mann's Nigel program, based on the systemic grammar of Halliday \[4\]. In contrast, other text generators have emphasized semantic processing of text, most notably those systems based on case grammar such as Goldman's BABEL generator\[7\] and Swanout's GIST\[9\]. Kafka combines etements of both paradigms in the generation of English text.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Kafka is a rule based English sentence generator used in the XCALIBUR natural language interface. Kafka uses a transformational rule interpreter written in Franz Lisp. These transformations are used to convert the XCALIBUR knowledge representation to conceptual dependency graphs and then into English text. Kafka includes confirmational information in the generated text, providing sufficient redundancy for the user to ascertain whether his query/command was correctly understood.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The goal of this work has been to simplify the text generation process by providing a single computational formalism of sufficient power to implement both semantic and syntactic processing. A prototype system has been written which demonstrates the feasibility of this approach to single sentence text generation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3">  systems. It is primarily a front-end for the XCON/XSEL expert systems developed by John McDermott \[5\].</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> XCALIBUR supports mixed-initiative dialogs which allow the user to issue commands, request data, and answer system queries in any desired order. XCALIBUR correctly understands some forms of ellipsis, and incorporates expectation directed spelling correction as error recovery steps to allow the processing of non-grammatical user input. Figure 2.1 shows the gross structure of the XCALIBUR interface. Figure 2-2 shows some typical user queries and the corresponding responses from the generator z. More details about XCALIBUR can be found in \[2\].</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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