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Natural Language Processing and Generation is a field of Computer Science which deals with the processing and generation of human languages by a computer that is done either automatically or semi-automatically (Chowdhury, 2003). Natural Language Processing and Generation is considered to be a sub-field of Artificial Intelligence (Downey & Charles, 2015). A computer is made to understand, interpret and generate text in natural languages similar to how humans do, using techniques like Machine Learning and Pattern Recognition. Machine Learning is related to the design of algorithms which lets the computer to learn from data automatically (Grace & Williams, 2016). The learning can be supervised (system is trained with a training set), unsupervised (system operates without prior knowledge of input or output) or reinforcement (system learns based on feedback given) (Downey & Charles, 2015; Grace & Williams, 2016). Natural language processing finds applications in the areas of games, spam filtering of emails, recommendations and other variety of fields (Downey & Charles, 2015; Bourara, Hamou & Amine, 2015; Bouraga, Jureta, Faulkner & Herssens, 2014). Our system uses the techniques of Natural Language Processing and Generation to process and generate meaningful sentences from hints and present that in a comprehendible form to the users. We have developed this story generation system from hints in Tamil language. The fundamental aim of this work is to teach the machine intelligence and making it behave like humans. In a small family society, the system when integrated could engage children by narrating stories when integrated with the text-to-speech system.
The aim is to build a Story Generator from hints in Tamil language which takes hint phrases as input and generates a syntactically and semantically correct story, utilizing the data corpus previously fed to the system. The system should represent the input hints and the story corpus as conceptual graph and match them to determine the most probable words and use them to generate a syntactically and semantically correct story as output.
This system is the first Story Generator from Hints in Tamil language. The usage of Conceptual Graph to represent the story corpus in intermediate form makes a contribution to the applications of Conceptual Graph. The readability of the generated output shows the efficiency of the Morphological Generator that we have developed. Though Tamil is a free-word order language, we have made an attempt to capture all the sentence patterns possible in Tamil language. We have designed our Conceptual graph algorithm in such a way that we retain all possible relevant information (including the adjectives and adverbs present in the corpus) and we put them to good use while developing the stories when new hint phrases are given as input. We have also developed rules and conditions specific to Tamil language such that all parts of speech such as adjectives, adverbs, etc are automatically learnt from the story corpus and not tagged using a look-up. Pronoun resolution has been implemented to the extent of identifying and resolving a pronoun by backtracking technique and with the help of suffixes.
This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 discusses the sources from which the ideas for different parts of the project were derived. The advantages and disadvantages of some of the related work are also discussed. Section 3 explains the overall system architecture and the design of various modules along with their complexity. Section 4 gives the input and output details of each module, Section 5 elaborates on the results of the implemented system and gives an idea of its efficiency. It also contains information about the dataset used for testing and other the observations made during testing. Section 6 concludes the paper and gives an overview of its criticisms. It also states the various extensions that can be made to the system to make it function more effectively.