An Experiment on Synthesis of Russian Parametric Constructions

AN EXPERI~FENTON SYNTHESIS OF RUSSIAN PARAMETRIC CONSTRUCTIONS I.S. Kononenko, E.L. Pershina AI Laboratory, Computing Center, Siberian Branch of the USSR Ac. Sci., Novosibirsk 630090, USSR ABSTRACT The paper describes an experimental model of syntactic structure generation starting from the limited fragment of se- mantics that deals with the quantitative values of object parameters. To present the input information the basic semantic units of four types are proposed:"object", "parameter", "function" and "constant". For the syntactic structure representation the system of syntactic components is used that combines the properties of the depen- dency and constituent systems: the syntac- tic components corresponding to wordforms and exocentric constituents are introduced and two basic subordinate relations ("ac- tant" and "attributive") are claimed to be necessary. Special attention has been de- voted to problems of complex correspon- dence between the semantic units and lexi- cal-syntactic means, In the process of synthesis such sections of the model as the lexicon, the syntactic structure gene- ration rules, the set of syntactic restric- tions and morphological operators are uti- lized to generate the considerable enough subset of Russian parametric constructions. I INTRODUCTION The semantics of Russian parametric constructions deals with the quantitative values of object parameters. The paramet- ric information is more or les~ easily ex- plicated by means of basic semantic units of four types: "object" ('table', 'boy'), "parameter" ('weight', 'length', 'age'), "function" ('more', 'equal', 'almost equal') and "constant" ('two meters', 'from 3 to 5 years'). In simple situations each of these units is separately realized in a lexeme or a phrase, their combinations forming full expressions with the given sense: malchik vesit bolshe dvadcati kilogrammov 'boy weights more than twenty kilograms'. It is precisely these direct and simple means of expressions that are usually used in systems generating natural language texts. Natural languages, however, operate with more complex means of expression ; one-to-one correspondence between semantic units and lexical items is not always the case. The complex situations are suggested here to be explained in terms of decompo- sition of the input semantic representa- tion (cf. the notion of form-reduction in Bergelson and Kibrik (1980)). This phe- nomenon is exemplified by such Russian le- xemes as stometrovka 'hundred-meters-long- distance' which semantically incorporates the four constituents of the parametric semantics. As an ideal, a language model should embrace mechanisms that provide generation and understanding of the constructions that make use of the various possibilities of lexicalization and grammaticalization of sense. The presented model deals with some aspects-of the phenomena that have not been Considered before: all the possi- bilities of decomposition of the input in- formation are taken into account and the means of syntactic structure representa- tion are developed to provide the synthe- sis of the parametric syntactic structure. The paper is organized as follows. In section 2 the set of semantic components is described. In section 3 the relevant syntactic notions are introduced. In sec- tion 4 the process of synthesis is outlin- ed, followed by conclusions in section 5. 2 SE~IANTIC COMPONENTS The information to-be-communicated …

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