Generation in a Natural Language Interface

The PHRED (PHR asal English Diction) generator produces the natural language output of Berkeley's UNIX Consultant system (UC). The generator shares its knowledge base with the language analyzer PHRAN (PHRasal ANalyser). The parser and generator, together a component of UC's user interface, draw from a database of pattern-concept pairs where the basic unit of the linguistic patterns is the phrase. Both are designed to provide multilingual capabilities, to facilitate linguistic paraphrases, and to be adaptable to the individual user's vocabulary and knowledge. The generator affords extensibility,simplicity, and processing speed while performing the task of producing natural language utterances from conceptual representations using a large knowledge base. This paper describes the implementation of the phrasal generator and discusses the role of generation in a user-friendly natural language interface.