Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Connectionist language generation promises better interaction between syntactic and lexical considerations and thus improved output quality. To realize this requires a connectionist treatment of grammar. This paper explains one way to do so. The basic idea is that constructions and their constituents are nodes in the same network that encodes world knowledge and lexical knowledge. The principal novelty is reliance on emergent properties. This makes it unnecessary to make explicit syntactic choice or to build up representations of sentence strucuire. The scheme includes novel ways of handling constituency, word order and optional constituents; and a simple way to avoid the problems of instantiation and binding. Despite the novel approach, the syntactic knowledge used is expressed in a form similar to that often used in linguistics; this representation straightforwardly defines parts of the knowlege network. These ideas have been implemented in FIG, a 'flexible incremental generator.'