Tactical Generation in a Free Constituent Order

Language

Dilek Zeynep Hakkani, Kemal Oflazer, and Ilyas Cicekli

Department of Computer Engineering and Information Science

Faculty of Engineering, Bilkent University, 06533 Bilkent, Ankara, Turkey

fhakkani,ko,[email protected]

Abstract

This paper describes tactical generation in Turkish, a free constituent order language, in

which the order of the constituents may change according to the information structure of the

sentences to be generated. In the absence of any information regarding the information struc-

ture of a sentence (i.e., topic, focus, background, etc.), the constituents of the sentence obey

a default order, but the order is almost freely changeable, otherwise. We have used a recur-

sively structured finite state machine (essentially an ATN minus the registers) for handling

the changes in constituent order, implemented as a right-linear grammar in a unification-based

generation grammar environment, GenKit, developed at Carnegie Mellon University{Center

for Machine Translation. Morphological realization has been implemented using an external

morphological analysis/generation component which performs morpheme selection and handles

morphographemic processes.

Keywords: realization, grammar theory.