Julia Lavid

Employing Knowledge Resources in a New Text Planner Architecture

We describe in this paper a new text planner that has been designed to address several problems we had encountered in previous systems. Motivating factors include a clearer and more explicit separation of the declarative and procedural knowledge used in a text generation system as well as the identification of the distinct types of knowledge necessary to generate coherent discourse, such as communicative goals, text types, schemas, discourse structure relations, and theme development patterns. This knowledge is encoded as separate resources and integrated under a flexible planning process that draws from appropriate resources whatever knowledge is needed to construct a text. We describe the resources and the planning process and illustrate the ideas with an example.

Contrastive patterns of mental transitivity in English and Spanish: a student-centred corpus-based study

This paper describes how the use of bilingual and translation corpora proves to be an invaluable resource for the exploration of lexicogrammatical patterns in the context of the contrastive linguistics classroom. The experience reported in this paper is part of a larger project where postgraduate students of Contrastive Linguistics (English-Spanish) at a large Spanish University (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) participate in the discovery of lexicogrammatical patterns in both languages through the use of bilingual (English-Spanish) comparable corpora, and parallel translation corpora. Using as a point of departure some theoretical issues which have received attention in previous descriptive research, the paper describes a series of guided corpus-based tasks carried out by learners in the area of mental transitivity in English and Spanish. These yielded interesting contrastive and translation results, which, it is suggested, can be fruitfully exploited as the source for teaching materials which systematically compare the major transitivity patterns in English and Spanish.

Contextual Constraints on Thematization in Written Discourse: An Empirical Study

Context modelling and its influence on the linguistic structure of texts has been the object of much research, especially within functional theories of language [Halliday, 1978; Kress and Threadgold, 1988; Lemke, 1988; Fairclough, 1989]. In these theories the issue is how broadly the concept of context is defined. For earlier functional linguists, it referred basically to the linguistic context, whereas for some contemporary theorists who operate within a much broader social semiotics, context needs to be more discursively understood as a multi-levelled phenomenon, and ‘text’ as the product of varying contextual levels and components. In general, researchers have recognized at least three levels of context—cultural, situational and textual—each one consisting of different components and variables, with variations in the schemes of classifications, and in interpretations of the significance of the concepts.1

Stylistic Differences in Multilingual Administrative Forms: A Cross-Linguistic Characterization

This article studies the stylistic variation in the design of administrative forms in three European countries—the United Kingdom, Italy, and Spain—through the linguistic analysis of a small corpus of multilingual administrative forms dealing with pension benefits and other kinds of allowances written in four different languages—English, Spanish, Italian, and German. The analysis included both monolingual administrative forms—written in English, Spanish, and Italian—and bilingual Italian/German and Italian/English forms. The purpose of the study was to search for cross-linguistic regularities in the design of administrative forms which would enable their characterization as a genre, both in terms of its staging structure and of the linguistic and formatting features of the elements which configure it as such. The analysis performed on the small corpus yielded interesting stylistic differences and tendencies in the design of comparable administrative forms in the different countries, characterized by different socio-cultural back-grounds. It is suggested that these differences are a reflection of the social attitudes of the different administrations toward their citizens.

Toward a multidimensional framework to guide the automated generation of text types

A central concern limiting the sophistication of text generation systems today is the ability to make appropriate choices given the bewildering number of options present during the planning and realisation processes. As illustrated in several systems [Hovy 88, Bateman & Paris 89, Paris 93], the same core communication may be realised in numerous different ways, depending (among other factors) on the nature and relation of the interlocutors, the context of the communication, the media employed, etc. The combinatoric number of possibilities of all such factors is extremely large. Since most of them are not well understood at this time, automated text generation may appear to be a hopeless endeavour.