Turkish text generation with systemic-functional grammar

Abstract

Natural Language Generation (NLG) is roughly decomposed into two stages: text planning, and text generation. In the text planning stage, the semantic description of the text is produced from the conceptual inputs. Then, the text generation system transforms this semantic description into an actual text. This thesis focuses on the design and implementation of a Turkish text generation system rather than text planning. To develop a text generator, we need a linguistic theory that describes the resources of the desired natural language, and also a software tool that represents and performs these linguistic resources in a computational environment. In this thesis, in order to carry out the mentioned requirements, we have used a functional linguistic theory called Systemic-Functional Grammar (SFG), and the FUF text generation system as a software tool. The ultimate text generation system takes the semantic description of the text sentence by sentence, and then produces a morphological description for each lexical constituent of the sentence. The morphological descriptions are worded by a Turkish morphological generator. Because of our concentration on the text generation, we have not considered the details of the text planning. Hence, we assume that the semantic description of the text is produced and lexicalized by an application (currently given by hand).