Sentence Generator

Overview

The program here is a proof of concept to demonstrate a model of generative morphosyntax I'm working on in a my senior honors thesis at Stony Brook University. The full content of the thesis will be available in the actual thesis paper (whenever that's finished). The model attempts to generate sentences in a currently left-recursive, and eventually mostly or strictly left-to-right, fashion, using a semantic model somewhat derived from lexical and conceptual semantics. A key concept in the model is that semantic patterns are associated with places within syntax and morphology, and that the patterns get conditionally selected for representation in possibly multiple locations, after which they can be used to insert a lexical item or produce further syntactic or morphological structure.

Program

The current version of the program is implemented in MITScheme. The core functionality is explained in the docs.

Download

2008-12-17 Sentence Generator α2 zip (35kb)

Bugs

α2: Saxon Genitives cause incorrect derivations.

Version History

Next Version
This version will hopefully allow a more coherent way to generate sentences that have long distance dependencies (e.g. agreement) as well as bizarre syntactic phenomena. It'll also hopefully make it possible to do alternative derivations in parallel by relying on the nondeterminstic nature of the pattern matcher.

2008-12-17 α2 zip (35kb)
This version implements pattern matching based generations instead of simple predicate identifying.

2008-12-08 α1 zip (28kb)
The MITScheme version is now up; the JS version has been removed. This version has some pattern matching utilities in the source code which have yet to be utilized.

2008-11-19
First implementation demonstrating the use of hierarchies of projection, rank-based selection, and the Argument-Predicate-Recursion model of phrase structure.