The present paper discusses speech production from the perspective of NL (natural language) generation in the context of dialogue, focusing on the selection of appropriate intonation. Bringing forward arguments from functional linguistics, we present a model of communicative-context-to-speech as an alternative to text-to-speech and concept-to-speech approaches.

This article discusses speech production in dialogue from the perspective of natural language generation, focusing on the selection of appropriate intonation. We argue that in order to assign appropriate intonation contours in speech producing systems, it is vital to acknowledge the diversity of functions that intonation fulfills and to account for communicative and immediate contexts as major factors constraining intonation selection. Bringing forward arguments from a functional-linguistically motivated natural language generation architecture, we present a model of context-to-speech as an alternative to the traditional text-to-speech and concept-to-speech approaches.

When making decisions, access to information and proactive provision of information have become a business imperative. It can be expected that a tremendous amount of information needs can be satisfied much better today by what is offered in information networks, be it the Internet or a corporate intranet for knowledge management purposes. Yet there is also a fair chance that someone issuing a search request (e.g., on the Web) will get drowned in a flood of useless information and thus may miss the only useful tidbit that comes along with it. Likewise, producers of information may not be able to identify suitable customers. Various approaches have been suggested to cope with these problems, for instance, databases containing meta-information or data-warehouse systems. The most promising approach is the use of electronic marketplaces, where consumers and producers of information virtually meet for interaction. A special blend of information traders strives to satisfy the needs of both. In this article we propose an architecture that implements a new consumer-producer interaction and discuss the major components in detail: (a) brokers, who play the role of intermediaries between producers and consumers, and (b) filters, which try to reduce the load of information on either of the participants.

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In text, temporal relations between events can be signalledin several ways; among them are specific lexicalitems, here called temporal discourse markers.We analyse the semantics of about 20 German subordinatingconjunctions and prepositions and transferthese findings to a sentence generation frameworkthat uses a dedicated discourse marker lexicon forproducing complex sentences. After discussing theontological decisions and the lexical representations,we demonstrate how this information...

Preventive quality management (PQM) is a very information-intensive task. Information as diverse as customer requirements, material specifications, and production line characteristics of a product as well as complaints related to similar products have to be taken into consideration when, e.g., predicting and evaluating possible failure modes of a product. However, only a subset of this information is actually relevant in a given stage of the PQM process and for a given person. In this paper, we exploit the notion of context to restrict the number of information sources accessed, make information selection more goal-directed, and finally, to customize system-user interaction.

Discourse markers are an important means to signal the kind of coherence relation holding between adjacent text spans. Research on generating discourse markers has been mainly concerned with causal markers, whereas temporal markers have not received much attention. In this paper, we identify semantic, pragmatic and syntactic features that are required to support a motivated choice of German temporal subordinating conjunctions and prepositions during text production. Information on individual markers is assembled in a discourse marker lexicon, which is used as a declarative resource at the sentence planning stage. We illustrate how this resource can be used to produce alternative verbalizations of the temporal relationship holding between two events. 1 M o t i v a t i o n In text, discourse markers signal the kind of coherence relation holding between adjacent text spans. For any but the most trivial applications of language generation, motivated marker choice is an important task. Whereas several studies have been concerned with causal markers and their interactions with other linguistic means, for instance, Vander Linden and Martin (1995), Rhsner and Stede (1992), Delin et al. (1996), temporal markers as signals of the temporal relation holding between two events have not received much attention, with the exception being Dorr and Gaasterland (1995). However, quite often, it is only by means of explicit temporal markers that the correct interpretation of a text can be ensured, as the following examples illustrate: (1) Der Abstand ist nachzumessen, nachdem das Band mindestens einen Umlauf ausge~hrt hat. (Check the distance after the belt has completed at least one round.) (2) W~ihrend Sie den Toaster betreiben, die Brotschlitze nicht abdecken. (While operating the toaster, do not cover the bread slots.) In both cases, the order of events as recounted i n the text does not correspond to their order of occurence: In example (1), nachdem (after) marks the event denoted in the second clause as temporally anterior to the one denoted in the first clause. In example (2), wiihrend (while) marks both events as cotemporal. Without a temporal marker, the order of events would not be obvious. Selecting an appropriate discourse marker for a given temporal relation is by no means a straightforward matter, though. First, one and the same temporal relation is verbalized differently depending on the syntactic and lexical properties of the clauses it conjoins. In German, the language we consider, such properties are, among others, tense, aspect, and syntactic structure. Interdependencies occur when two temporal events are realized in the same sentence; we will therefore restrict the study of German temporal markers to subordinating conjunctions and prepositions. Second, temporal discourse markers can even overwrite the temporal relations indicated by other linguistic means like tense and aspect, as noted by researchers who work in the analysis of temporal markers (e.g. Hitzeman et al. 1995). In a nutshell, when aiming at selecting an appropriate temporal marker in text generation one needs a representation of temporal markers that enables marker choice and other sentence level decisions (such as tense and aspect selection) to mutually constrain each other. In this paper, we take up the idea suggested in Grote and Stede (1998) of a discourse marker lexicon as a declarative resource at the sentence planning stage. We demonstrate how such a lexicon for temporal markers can be employed in text generation to produce different verbalizations of the same underlying temporal organization depending on other generation decisions. The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 reviews related work on generating temporal markers. Section 3 describes the major semantic, pragmatic and syntactic properties of German temporal prepositions and subordinating conjunctions. Section 4 presents the generation perspective: It briefly discusses the shape of the discourse marker lexicon, introduces the features used in the lexicon, and presents sample lexicon entries and their application in the generation process.

In text, discourse markers signal the kind of coherence relation holding between adjacent text spans; for example, because, since; and for this reason are different markers for causal relations. Fo r any but the most simple applications of text generation, marker Selection is an important aspect of producing cohesive text. However, present systems use markers in fairly simplistic ways andcannot make use of the full potential of markers that language offers for a given relation. • To improve this situation, we propose a specialized lexicon for discourse markers, which holds the relevant constraints and preferences associated with the markers, and which can be used by a text generator to make an informed choice among alternative ways of expressing a relation in t he given context, we demonstrate how .the lexicon can be employed in the generation • process and propose to perform discourse marker choice in the sentence planning stage, where the interactions with other generation• decisions can be accounted for.

A great part of the product knowledge in manufacturing enterprises is only available in the form of natural language documents. The know-how recorded in these documents is an essential resource for successful competition in the market. From the viewpoint of knowledge management, however, documents have a severe limitation: They do not capture the wealth of knowledge contained in these documents, since the entire knowledge is not spelled out on the linguistic surface. In order to overcome this limitation, the notion of a document as a particular kind of realization of (or view on) the underlying knowledge is introduced. This chapter discusses the major steps in realizing this approach to documents: Knowledge acquisition, knowledge representation, and techniques to automatically generate multilingual documents from knowledge bases. Further; we describe how the required product knowledge can be represented in a sharable and reusable way.

The current article discusses the problem of appropriate intonation selection in Person-Machine dialogues, such as those expected in intelligent information systems when, for example, information retrieval is required. An approach is proposed which integrates the previously mostly separate paradigms of automatic natural language generation and speech synthesis in a Person-Machine dialogue scenario. The article introduces the two independent basis components adopted in the approach - a dialogue model for information retrieval (COR) and a text generation system for German (KOMET-PENMAN) - and develops from these a communicative-context-to-speech system architecture. This system provides for the flexible and context-appropriate selection of intonation patterns. The paper argues that such an approach removes some of the well-known gaps in both text-to-speech and concept-to-speech systems.

Natural language generation aims at automatically verbalizing a “deep” representation of content, so that coherent and cohesive text originates. To produce such cohesive discourse, it is important to signal many of the relations holding between text segments to the reader by means of cue words, which we call discourse markers. Current generation systems usually do this in a simplistic way, e.g., by using one marker per relation. In reality, however, language offers a wide range of markers from which informed choices should be made. This paper suggests a method for equipping generators with the knowledge to select the most appropriate discourse marker from a set of candidate expressions. We concentrate on one area of discourse relations, the CONCESSION family, and identify its underlying semantics and pragmatics. On the basis of extensive corpus studies, we propose a new classification of CONCESSION markers in English and German, and then suggest a generation model for producing bilingual text that can incorporate marker choice into its overall decision framework.

This article is concerned with determining the constraints on the selection of appropriate intonation in speech generation in human-machine information seeking dialogues. The two pillars of our system|a state-of-the-art computational dialogue model and a state-of-the-art NL generator|are presented. Based on this, we determine the kinds of linguistic and pragmatic knowledge needed to su(cid:14)ciently constrain choice in the intonational resources of the system. We take into consideration factors such as dialogue history, speaker's attitudes, hearer's expectations, and semantic speech functions.