Text Generation for Intermediate Non-native Speakers of English

Abstract

This paper describes the microplanner of the SILK system which can generate texts appropriate for intermediate non-native users on discourse level. Four factors (i.e. nucleus position, between-text-span punctuation, embedded discourse markers and punctuation pattern) are regarded to affect the readability at discourse level. It is the preferences among these factors that decide the readability. Since the number of possible combinations of the preferences is huge, we use Genetic Algorithm to solve such a problem. We adopt two methods to evaluate the system: one is evaluating the reliability of the SILK system by analysing how often it re-generates corpus texts, another is judging readability by human subjects. The evaluation results show that the system is reliable and the generation results are appropriate for intermediate non-native speakers on discourse level.