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<Paper uid="H89-1022">
  <Title>A Flexible Interface for Linking Applications to Penman's Sentence Generator</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="153" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Penman is designed as a domain-independent text generator that can be installed in an application system to generate text for the application on demand. Motivating this design is the hypothesis that a significant amount of knowledge about language and how it is produced can be re-used in different application domains.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Assuming that this hypothesis is correct, the construction of an effective interface between a general-purpose text generator and application programs is a significant problem to be solved in text generation research.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Penman's interface with applications is the subject of this report, focusing on how it has been designed to achieve a high degree of flexibility.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> In designing Penman's interface, we faced the following dilemma: how to make the system easy to use by an application programmer without compromising its expressive power. Penman's grammar can control several hundred different (semantic) features. If the application program were required to specify values for all of these features for every sentence to be generated, the system would be too complex for most practical purposes. If multiple texts are to be generated for the application, the interface can be made more efficient by factoring it into two components:  1. preparatory knowledge sources: making knowledge of the application domain available to the generator; 2. demands for text: inputs specifying information to be expressed in each particular sentence.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4">  By installing various preparatory knowledge sources for each application domain, the size and complexity of inputs that must be dynamically constructed to generate individual sentences can be minimized.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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