Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper discusses the design and implementation of a connectionist system for generation of well-formed English sentences of limited length and syntactic variability. The design employs several levels of interacting units for making appropriate decisions. It uses a simple technique for specifying assignment of input concepts to roles in a sentence and also has a reusable subnetwork for the expansion of noun phrases. The same NP-subnetwork is used for the expansion of noun phrases corresponding to the subject as well as the object phrases of the generated sentences.The input to the system consists of parallel activation of a cluster of nodes representing conceptual specification of the sentence whereas the output is in the form of sequential activation of nodes corresponding to the words constituting the sentence. The system can produce simple sentences in both active and passive voices, and in several tenses. Results of a simulation experiment performed are also included.