Guy Lapalme

Guy Lapalme

This document illustrates the use of pyrealb for generating two parallel texts (English and French) from a single source of data. The data selection and text organisation processes are shared between the two languages. only language dependent word and phrasing choices are distinct processes. The realized texts thus convey identical information in both languages without the risk of being lost in translation. This is especially important in cases where strict and simultaneous bilingualism is required. We first present the types of applications targeted by this approach and how the pyrealb English and French realizer can be used for achieving this goal in a natural way. We describe an object-oriented organization to ensure a convenient realization in both languages. To illustrate the process, different types of applications are then briefly sketched with links to the source code. A brief comparison of the text generation is given with the output of an instance of a GPT.

Guy Lapalme

This paper describes the design principles behind jsRealB (Version 4.0), a surface realizer written JavaScript for English or French sentences from a specification inspired by the constituent syntax formalism but for which a dependency-based input notation is also available. jsRealB can be used either within a web page or as a node.js module. We show that the seemingly simple process of text realization involves many interesting implementation challenges in order to take into account the specifics of each language. jsRealB has a large coverage of English and French and has been used to develop realistic data-to-text applications and to reproduce existing literary texts and sentences from Universal Dependency annotations. Its source code and that of its applications are available on GitHub. The port of this approach to Python (pyrealb) is also presented.

Michael Zock, Guy Lapalme

Historically two types of NLP have been investigated: fully automated processing of language by machines (NLP) and autonomous processing of natural language by people, i.e. the human brain (psycholinguistics). We believe that there is room and need for another kind, INLP: interactive natural language processing. This intermediate approach starts from peoples' needs, trying to bridge the gap between their actual knowledge and a given goal. Given the fact that peoples' knowledge is variable and often incomplete, the aim is to build bridges linking a given knowledge state to a given goal. We present some examples, trying to show that this goal is worth pursuing, achievable and at a reasonable cost.