GENERATING TEXT WITHOUT TREES

In this paper, I present an architecture for generating extended text. This architecture is implemented in a system, Salix, which incrementally generates natural language texts whose structure is derived from the domain structure of the subject matter. The architecture is composed of data‐driven, domain‐independent strategies for producing increments of text. The strategies include metastrategies that combine or choose among all strategies that are applicable at each increment or decide what to do if no strategy applies. Salix's capabilities are demonstrated in generating texts, in the domains of houses and families, that are comparable to descriptions elicited from human speakers. Salix has also been utilized to generate texts about text style (Germain 1991). The approach to text generation presented here is compared to others in the literature along the dimensions of local organization, coherence, focusing, and domain independence. An argument is made for the approach presented here that locally organizes and incrementally generates coherent text.