A Domain-Specific Statistical Surface Realizer

We present a search-based approach to automatic surface realization given a corpus of domain sentences. Using heuristic search based on a statistical language model and a structure we introduce called an inheritance table we overgenerate a set of complete syntactic-semantic trees that are consistent with the given semantic structure and have high likelihood relative to the language model. These trees are then lexicalized, linearized, scored, and ranked. This model is being developed to generate real-time navigation instructions.