Function and Content of the Package

FUF implements a natural language surface generator using the theory of unification grammars (cf. bibliography for references). It follows most closely the original FUG formalism introduced in [#!Kay79!#]. Its input is a Functional Description (fd) describing the meaning of an utterance and a grammar (also described as an fd).  The Syntax of fds is fully described in section . The output is an English sentence expressing this meaning according to the grammatical constraints expressed by the grammar.

There are two major stages in this process: unification and linearization.    

Unification consists in making the input-fd and the grammar ``compatible'' in the sense described in [#!Kay79!#]. It comes down to enriching the input-fd with directives coming from the grammar and indicating word order, syntactic constructions, number agreement and other features.

The enriched input is then linearized to produce an English sentence. The linearizer includes a morphology module handling all the problems of word formation (s's, preterits, ...).