Morphology and cross dependencies in the synthesis of personal pronouns in Romance languages

Morphology and cross dependencies In the synthesis of personal pronouns in Romance languages Laurence DANLOS and Fiagametta NAMER LADL, Universit6 de Paris 7 2, Place Jussieu 75251 Paris Cedex 05, France Abstract This paper describes some of the problems that arise from the synthesis of personal pronouns in a system tlrat generates texts in Romance languages. It puts the emphasis first on the fact that fire morphological level has to betaken hire account early in the generation process, second on the numerous "cross dependency" phenomena which are to b,; found when the synthesis of an element X depends upon that of another element Y and when the synthesis of "Y depends upon that of X. The linguistic examples are taken from French and Italian languages, for wlfich a robust generatiort system has been implemented. 1 Introduction It is generally believed that a generation system can be modularized into a sequence of components, the first one making the "high level" decisions (i.e. the conceptual decisions), the following ones making the linguistic decisions (e.g. lexical and syntactic construction choices), the penultimate, one performing the "low level" operations (i.e. the syntactic operations), and the last one handling the morphological operations. We have shown in (L. DanIos1985, 1987a) that the conceptual and linguistic decisions are operations that depend on each other. Therefore, we designed a generation system modularized in the following way: a "strategic component" makes the conceptual and linguistic decisions simultaneously and gives back "clause templates" which are synthesized into clauses by a "syntactic component". A simplified version of the clause template syntax is the following one (a more complete version is presented in (L. Danlos 1987b)) : [Cll = (:el [subject] [verb] cplt n (0<_n~2)) [subject] :: (:subject token) [verb] = (:verb verb ) cplt = [dir-object] / I/t-object] / [de-object] /[prgp- object] [dir-object] = (:dir-object token) [h-object] = (:h-object token) [de-object] = (:de-object token) [pr6p-object] = (:pr6p-object [pr6p] (:object token)) [prgp] = (:pr6p preposition ) The prepositional complements JR-object] and [de-object] are complements respectively introduced by ~, and de in French, a and di in Italian. They are separated from the prepositional complements [prgp-object] introduced by other prepositions because they have a specific syntactic behaviour, especially in regard to pronominalization (cf. 3). An example of a clause template is : CC1 (:subject HUM1) (:verb amare ) (:dir-object HUM2)) with HUM1 =: PERSON HUM2 =: PERSON NAME : Idgo NAME : Maria SEX : mast SEX : fern According to the context (i.e. fire clause templates that have been previously synthesized), the syntactic component, which handles pronominalization, produces one of the following Italian clauses (given that the verb is in the present tense) : Ugo ama Maria (Ugo loves Mary) Ugo l'ama (Ugo loves her) Quest'uomo l'ama (This man loves her) Ama questa donna (He loves this woman) It will be shown in 3 that pronominalization involves the morphological level. Tire decisions concerning pronominalization, which is a stumbling block for natural language processing, must certainly not be made last. Thus, the morphological …

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