Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We explore the problem of generating natural language temporal expressions and show that it is amenable to solution by the application of hierarchical constraint propagation.Constraints derived either directly or indirectly (via transformations) from client data are propagated over the hierarchical structure provided by syntactic templates and are required to be consistent at any given node. Multiple sources of constrcdnts must be used to achieve lexical selection of a single item.