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<Paper uid="C92-2112">
  <Title>DEEP COMPREHENSION, GENERATION AND TRANSLATION OF WEATHER FORECASTS (WEATHRA)</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
1) Meteorological objects
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> These include both objects proper, such as low pressure areas and other air masses, and episodes (states, events, and processes) describing phenomena such as rain, change of temperature, as well as locations and time intervals.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
2) Discourse objects
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Discourse objects can be described by meteorological objects, but they also have linguistic expressions. Not all meteorological objects whose existence is implied by a forecast describe discourse objects.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="4" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
3) Grammatical representations
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Grammatical representations refer to expressions signifying discourse objects The main levels of representation in Weathra are: Level of meteorological objects air mass: gale doing:move speed: fast direction: Scandinavia Level of discourse objects  Scandinavia. It moves fast. The permanent concepts which constitute frames with information is only background objects alluded to by the words (cf Nirenburg &amp; Defrise, 1991). The concept (frame) gale thus includes the information that a 'gale' has speed and that this speed is between 20 and 30 meters per second, a direction (which all speeds have), often leads to accidents at sea and along the coasts, etc. To an English-speaking person the concept is known to be denoted by the word gale, to a Swede by storm, but that is not essential information in the concept 'gale', The concept 'move' is to include the information that movement implies being at one place first and another later, a certain speed and direction. To those who are familiar with it the concept 'Scandinavia' includes the information that this is a place and an area, which covers Norway, Sweden, Denmark etc. Scandinavia is a proper name and not a generic noun and something cannot be said to be an instance of the concept 'Scandinavia'. Concepts are stored as frames using the tool FLEX which is available with LPA MacProlog.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Understanding and generating weather forecasts The program allows a (telegraphic or full) sentence to be parsed by the grammar and lexicon applying some implicational morphological procedures. This analysis renders a kind of functional representation as shown above. This representation is parsed by mapping procedures which look for depictable objects and places. Words such as sun, sunny, result in a sun in the proper place in a map, rain results in the proper symbol, westerly winds results in an arrow with the proper direction. Note that several words may result in the same symbol on the map. Sunny, sun and fair will all be represented by the icon &amp;quot;sun&amp;quot;. The functional representation is also scanned by the concept finder which looks for concepts about which it has information. Thus the frame 'gale' is used as the prototype of the instance O1 and 'move' is used as the prototype of 02. The meteorological finder looks for data for its general frames.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The system can be used for generation by placing a certain icon on the map and calling for generation. This will result in a sentence such as telegraphic: Sunny AcrEs DE COLING-92, NANTES, 23-28 nOra&amp;quot; 1992 7 5 4 PROC. OF COLING-92, NANTES, AUG. 23-28, 1992 in Southern Sweden, Sun in Southern Sweden, Fair in Southern Sweden, or descriptive It will be sunny.., There will be sun .... The weather will be fair...</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The generation process may be set to generate telegraphic or full utterances, single or coordinated utterances, texts where the area is kept in focus, e.g. Wales will get sun and light winds or coordinations with different areas such as Wales will get sun, but Cornwall will get rain. The procedures may also generate texts where the focus is on the weather type as illustrated by There will be snow in Scotland and in the Midlands or There will be snow in Scotland, but rain in Wales. Translation The generation triggered by placing a meteorological icon on the map can be rendered in English or Swedish. Parsed and analyzed Swedish forecasts can be translated into English using the functional event representation. The functional representations of English and Swedish are very similar and the few differences are handled by transfer rules.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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