TITLE:		TOWARD A COMMUNICATION DEVICE WHICH GENERATED SENTENCES
AUTHORS:	Kathleen McCoy, Patrick Demasco, Yu Gong,
		Christopher Pennington and Charles Rowe
COMMENTS:	(c) 1989 RESNA Press. Reprinted with permission.


ABSTRACT:
Sentence generation will be an integral part of future augmentative
communication devices. By employing natural language processing
techniques, we hope to enhance the speed, flexibility, and ease of use
of current word-based systems. In this paper, we discuss the
generation component of our 'compansion' system, which expands
compressed messages entered by the user into full English
sentences. The two phases of this component are (1) the translator,
which converts a semantic representation of the message into a
syntactic 'deep structure' representation and (2) the generator, which
takes this 'deep structure' and uses a functional unification grammar
to produce a complete English sentence. Because of this modular
design, the generator is independent of whatever semantic
representation is used; thus, it could be easily adapted to other
systems (e.g., sign language translation) through the use of a
different translator.