Dealing with verbal inflection in natural language selectionresources for minimal requirement

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of the inflection of the Spanish verb produced during the development of a generation grammar of Spanish for the generator KPML (http://www.fb10.uni-bremen.de/anglistik/langpro/kpml). The claim made in the article is that the analysis is maximally efficient from the point of view of Natural Language Generation, on the grounds that it allows generating the 53 inflected forms associated to any Spanish verb requiring a minimum of information in the lexicon component. The defining characteristic of the analysis is its modularity: instead of establishing models of inflection based on the whole conjugation of a verb, various restricted models were created. These restricted models deal with individual tenses, and they describe the variation patterns to be found in the stem and the endings of verbs within each tense.