Phrasal template

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A phrasal template is a phrase-long collocation that contains one or several empty slots which may be filled by words to produce individual phrases. Often there are some restrictions on the grammatic category of the words allowed to fill particular slots. An example is the phrase "common stocks rose <Number> to <Number>", e.g., "common stocks rose 1.72 to 340.36". [1]

Phrasal templates are akin to forms in which blanks are to be filled with data.

The notion is used in natural language processing systems and in language generators, such as application-oriented report generators.[2] [3]

A special case of phrasal templates are snowclones, which "clone" popular cliches. For example, "pink is the new red", Quiet Is the New Loud and the multitudes were spawned by "Pink is the navy blue of India" according to the template "Y is the new X".

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[edit] References

  1. ^ Susan Armstrong (1994) Using Large Corpora, ISBN 0262510820, p. 149
  2. ^ Karen Kukich. "Knowledge-Based Report Generation: A Knowledge Engineering Approach to Natural Language Report Generation." Ph.D. Thesis, Information Science Department, University of Pittsburgh, 1983.
  3. ^ L. Boubeau, D. Carcagno, E. Goldberg, R. Kittredge, and A. Polguere. "Bilingual generation of weather forecasts in an operations environment." In Proceedings of the 13 th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING-90), Volume 1, pages 9—92, Helsinki, 1990.