language: en

THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF N-GRAMS IN GENERATION

Irene Langkilde and Kevin Knight
Information Sciences Institute University of Southern California
Marina del Rey, CA 90292
ilangkil@isi.edu and knight@isi.edu

Abstract We examine the practical synergy between symbolic and statistical language processing in a generator called Nitrogen. The analysis provides insight into the kinds of linguistic decisions that bigram frequency statistics can make, and how it improves scalability. We also discuss the limits of bigram statistical knowledge. We focus on specific examples of Nitrogen's output.

1 Introduction