Systemic Grammar in Computation: The NIGEL Case
Systemic Functional Linguistics, Part 2 - Volume 2 - Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen
Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen [+]
University of International Business and Economics (UIBE), Beijing
Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen is a Swedish-born linguist and a leading figure in the systemic functional linguistics (SFL) school, having authored or co-authored more than 160 books, refereed journal articles, and papers in refereed conference proceedings, with contributions to three television programs. He is currently Distinguished Professor in the Department of Linguistics at University of International Business and Economics,
Beijing, Distinguished Professor of Linguistics, in the School of Foreign Languages, Hunan University, Guest Professor at Beijing Science and Technology University, and Honorary Professor at the Australian National University. Before this, he was Chair Professor, Department of English, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and Professor in the Linguistics Department of Macquarie University. Professor Matthiessen has worked in areas as diverse as language typology, linguistics and computing, grammatical descriptions of various languages, grammar and discourse, healthcare communication studies, functional grammar for English-language teachers, text analysis and translation, multisemiotic studies, and the evolution of language. He has supervised over 40 research students.
Description
Chapter 2 illustrates how systemic functional linguistics makes contributions in the areas of grammar and choosers for grammar in computation to fulfil the demands placed upon a large-scale computational grammar in a text generator, Nigel, that was being developed as part of Penman project. In particular it demonstrates the metafunctional organization of systemic grammar that leads naturally to a multi-functional factoring of the sentence generation process. This process is then defined in terms of features of grammatical and semantic choice and their realization statements with realization operators for text generation.