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<Paper uid="W02-1713">
  <Title>XtraGen -- A Natural Language Generation System Using XMLand Java-Technologies</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
2 Generation Grammars
2.1 Formalism
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The grammar formalism conceived for the XtraGen system has been developed from an application-oriented point of view. This means that from our standpoint real-world applications hardly ever require a full and complete linguistic coverage which is striven for by linguistically motivated generation systems. Therefore our formalism is based on extended templates that allow the inclusion of pre-defined and dynamically retrieved text, constraint-based inflection and a context-free selection mechanism. The development of this formalism was strongly influenced by the ideas found in the (Lispbased) formalism of the TG/2 system (Busemann, 1996; Wein, 1996) and the YAG system (Channarukul, 1999).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> A template has the overall form as depicted in the Backus-Naur Form in figure 2.1. Each part of the template will be elaborated below.</Paragraph>
    <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
2.2 Conditions
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> Conditions describe the exact circumstances under which a certain template can be applied and its actions executed. There are two distinct basic types</Paragraph>
    </Section>
  </Section>
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