Báo cáo khoa học: Syntactic Dependence and the Computer Generation of Coherent Discourse

An experiment in the computer generation of coherent discourse was successfully conducted to test a hypothesis about the transitive nature of syntactic dependency relations among elements of the English language.
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Báo cáo khoa học: "Syntactic Dependence and the Computer Generation of Coherent Discourse" [Mechanical Translation, Vol.7, no.2, August 1963] Syntactic Dependence and the Computer Generation of Coherent Discourse by Sheldon Klein and Robert F. Simmons,* System Development Corporation, Santa Monica, California An experiment in the computer generation of coherent discourse was successfully conducted to test a hypothesis about the transitive nature of syntactic dependency relations among elements of the English language. The two primary components of the experimental computer program consisted of a phrase structure generation grammar capable of generat- ing grammatical nonsense, and a monitoring system which would abort the generation process whenever it was apparent that the dependency structure of a sentence being generated was not in harmony with the dependency relations existing in an input source text. The final outputs of the system were coherent paraphrases of the source text. An implica- tion of the hypothesis is that certain types of dependency relations are invariant under a variety of linguistic transformations. Potential applica- tions include automatic kernelizing, question answering, automatic essay writing, and automatic abstracting systems. The question of the validity of transitive dependency models for languages other than English should be explored.Introduction source text is placed in the vocabulary pool of thisThis paper sets forth the hypothesis that there is in program, and the generation of grammatical nonsensethe English language a general principle of transitivity is initiated.of dependence among elements and describes an ex- At the same time, a monitoring program inspectsperiment in the computer generation of coherent dis- the sentence being generated and aborts the genera-course that supports the hypothesis. tion process whenever it is apparent that such a sen- The hypothesis of transitive dependency, simply tence would have dependency relations incompatiblestated, is that if a word or element a modifies a word b with those of the source text. The only permissibleand b modifies c, it may be said that a transitively final output is a coherent paraphrase of the source text.modifies, or is dependent on, c. Based on this principle From one point of view, the system functions as ait was found possible to design and program a system decision procedure for determining whether or not ato generate coherent discourse using both the AN/ sentence is the result of an application of legitimateFSQ-32 (a large IBM military computer) and the IBM transformations upon other sentences. The implication7090. The input to the coherent discourse generator is that dependency, with its transitive and intransitiveconsists of written English text which has been ana- aspects, may be an invariant under many linguisticlyzed in terms of syntactic dependency relations. The transformations. Also, the coherent discourse generatoroutput is a large set of sentences generated by the can be modified to act as an automatic kernelizer ofcomputer, each of which is a coherent paraphrase of English sentences.some portions of the input text. It is also possible to describe the operation of the We treat syntactic dependency as a primitive rela- system in terms of the Stratificational Grammar of Syd- ney Lamb8. By relying upon constancies of word co-tion which is transitive in some environments, intransi-tive in others. While dependency may always be transi- occurrence, the system provides a method of goingtive in a system of formal logical syntax for English, fro ...