GIST English Generator

Book One

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2

Program Synthesis and Understanding

This paper describes a prototype English generator which can produce English descriptions of program specifications written in Gist, a program specification language being developed at ISI. Such a facility is required because although Gist is a high level specification language, specifications written in it, like those in all other formal specification languages, are unreadable. There are several reasons for this unreadability: strange syntax; redundancy elimination; lack of thematic structure; implicit remote interactions; no representation of the motivation or rationale behind the specification; and a strict reliance on textual presentation. The current generator deals with the first two problems and part of the third. Our plans for dealing with the rest are outlined after a description of the current generator.