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<Paper uid="W94-0311">
  <Title>Semantic Lexicons: the Cornerstone for Lexical Choice in Natural Language Generation</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Whether we talk of monolingual or multilingual generation, it is not surprising that there has been very little focus on the area of lexical choice. Lexical choice has often been side-stepped, not because it is a daunting issue, but rather because the interest in natural language generation (NLG) first focused on syntactic, morphological and discourse aspects of language. Semantic accuracy has been therefore sacrificed in the production of fluent grammaticalsentences. In section 2, we highlight the issue of lexical choice, by arguing that generation systems must integrate lexical semantics and focusing on the treatment of Adjective-noun (Adj-Noun) collocations. We introduce the notion of &amp;quot;semantic collocations&amp;quot;, which allows us to reduce the set of collocations which are usually listed in lexicons.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> In section 3, we present relevant aspects of the Generative Lexicon Theory (GLT), which, we argue, provides a better representation and interpretation of lexical information, enabling us to generate the set of possible semantic collocations in a predictive way without listing them in lexical entries. GLT is still under development from a theoretical point of view and up to now no generation system (as far as the authors are We would llke to thank Susan Armstrong, Paul Buitelaar, Federica Busa, Dominique Estival, James Pustejovsky, Graham Russell and Scott Waterman for their helpful comments.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> aware) has tried to integrate or implement its ideas.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> We propose to do so, and are currently studying its theoretical adequacy for generation with special reference to the issue of lexical choice. In section 4, we show that it is possible to calculate Adj-Noun semantic collocations ( a long book; an easy novel; a fast car) as opposed to the type of collocations where idiosyncrasy seems to be involved ( a large coke vs. a big coke). Finally, in section 5, we emphazise the adequacy of a framework such as GLT to generate the possible set of semantic collocations.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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