GNOME: Generating Nominal Expressions

This project focussed on the specific task of generating nominal expressions within a text. This is an area where achievements in NLG appear to lag behind those in parsing and interpretation; for instance there are well-known algorithms in the literature for resolving pronouns as part of the interpretation of texts, but these results have not been systematically applied to the generation task. Additionally, work on the generation of nominals has not profited much from theoretical research in formal semantics and psycholinguistics on the meaning, interpretation and production of nominal expressions.

In the GNOME project, we developed general algorithms which were informed by corpus analysis and results of psycholinguistic studies on how people produce and understand nominal expressions.

The resulting algorithms were implemented in the ICONOCLAST project and HCRC's ILEX system.