Constraints on the Generation of Tense, Aspect, and Connecting Words from Temporal Expressions

Generating language that reflects the temporal organization of represented knowledgerequires a language generation model that integrates contemporary theories of tense and
aspect, temporal representations, and methods to plan text. This paper presents a model
that produces event combinations and appropriate connecting words to relate them. We
distinguish between inherent and non-inherent aspectual features of verbs and describe
an algorithm that uses these features to select tense, aspect, and temporal connecting
words for generating text based on time-stamped information. The main result of this
work is the successful incorporation of constrained linguistic theories of tense and as-
pect in a self-contained module called CONGEN that produces a ranked list of temporal
connectives and tense/aspect possibilities from pairs of time-stamped literals. We show
that the theoretical results described herein have been verified in a large-scale corpus
analysis. The framework serves as the basis of a component designed to enhance the
English output of a constrained generation system.