Generatlon of Simple Turkish Sentences with Systemic-Functional Grammar

/ II I / / / / I I I I Generation of Simple Turkish Sentences with Systemic-Functional Grammar* Ilyas Cicekli Dept. of Comp. Eng. and Info. Sc. Bilkent University, 06533 Bilkent, Ankara, Turkey ilyas@cs, bilkent, edu. tr Turgay Korkmaz Dept. of Comp. and Info. Sc. Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244, USA tkorkmaz@mailbox, syr. edu Abstract This paper mainly presents a Turkish sentence generator for producing the actual text from its semantic description. To concentrate on the text generation rather than text planning, we assume that the lexicalized semantic de- scription of the text is produced in some way, currently given by hand. In the generation, we need a linguistic theory to describe the linguistic resources, and also a software tool to perform them in a computational environ- ment. We use a functional linguistic theory called Systemic-Functional Grammar (SFG) to represent the linguistic resources, and FUF text generation system as a software tool to perform them. In this paper, we present the systemic-functional representation and real- ization of simple Turkish sentences. 1 Introduction Natural language generation is a kind of process that encodes the mental picture of reality into a sequence of words called grammatical units such as clause, verbal group, noun group etc. The units of a gram- mar can be ordered in terms of a rank scale, from the largest to the smallest unit (structural classifi- cation) (Halliday, 1985): a sentence consists of one or more clauses; a clause consists of one or more phrases (groups); a phrase consists of one or more words; a word consists of a root word, and zero or more morphemes; a morpheme is the smallest unit. A simple sentence consists of only one main pro- tess and several components that complement or modify the main process. Each component may be realized by complex syntactic structures but it does not change the simple structure of the sentence. In other words, the number of words in a sentence does not determine whether the sentence is simple or not. The main property of the simple sentence is that each component in the sentence has a function that is determined by the main process such as actor, *This work was supported by NATO Science for sta- bility Project Grant TU-LANGUAGE. goal, time, manner, etc. A complex sentence con- sists of more than one simple sentence that may be structurally or semantically connected to each other. Because the generation of simple sentences must be achieved before the generation of complex sentences, we concentrate on the generation of simple sentences in this paper. We analyze simple Turkish sentences from the systemic-functional perspective to determine their structural and functional descriptions (Patten, 1988). By using these descriptions, we have con- structed the system network of simple sentences and we have implemented a sentence generator in Func- tional Unification Formalism (FUF) (Elhadad, 1990- 2) to perform the linguistic resources. In our analy- sis, we determine the main process, participants and circumstantials of a simple sentence, and how they are realized in …

Content truncated to 500 words