Introduction

Lexical choice cannot be processed in text generation without appealing to a lexicon which takes into account many lexico-semantic relations. The text generation system must be able to treat the immediate and the larger lexical context.

1. a) The immediate lexical context consists of the lexemes that surround the lexical item to be generated. This context must absolutely be taken into account in the case of collocational constraints, which restrict ways of expressing a precise meaning to certain lexical items, for example as in expressions like pay attention, receive attention or narrow escape (Wanner & Bateman, 1990; Iordanskaja et al., 1991; Nirenburg & Nirenburg, 1988; Heid & Raab, 1989).

2. b) The larger textual context consists of the linguistic content of previous and subsequent clauses. This context is the source for cohesive links (Halliday & Hasan, 1976) with the lexical items to be generated in the current clause, as in:

In the second sentence, lecturer is coreferential with Professor Elmuck and the audience is coreferential with third-year students. These semantic links are due to the lexico-semantic relations between, on the one hand, lecturer (“agent noun”) and lecture, and on the other hand, between audience (“patient noun”) and lecture.

In this chapter, we will show that the Lexical Functions (LFs) of the Explanatory Combinatorial Dictionary (hereafter ECD) (Mel'čuk et al., 1984a, 1988; Mel'čuk & Polguère, 1987; Meyer & Steele, 1990) are well suited for these tasks in text generation.