https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2656-7868

David McDonald's publications

The page you are reading organizes them by topic area, along with links to the actual papers. Please respect the rights of the copyright holders and do not repost any of these papers without their permission.

As is inevitable when you've been at it this long, most of my older papers are still only available in hard copy. I'm gradually working my way through the machines in my basement to find ways that will let me bring them online. If anyone knows where to get translators for MacWrite or for the 'R' typesetting language, please let me know.

Contents

• Parsing and Information Extraction
• Language Generation
• Semantic Representation and World Modeling
• Discourse
• Eclectic pieces

Parsing and Information Extraction

• Lexical Inference and the Problem of the Long Tail, AAAI Technical Report SS-09-07, March 25, 2009, Stanford University, pp. 71-73. PDF


• Partially Saturated Relations: a better fit to constituents for better information extraction, in the proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Computational Semantics, January 10-12, 2001. Tilburg.


• Partially Saturated Referents as a Source of Complexity in Semantic Interpretation, in the proceedings of the NAACL 2000 workshop Syntactic and Semantic Complexity in Natural Language Processing Systems, April 30, 2000, Seattle, pp. 51-58. ACL Anthology, PDF


• Markup is Markup, in the working notes for the AAAI Spring Symposium Natural Language Processing for the World Wide Web, March 24-26, 1997, pp. 104-111. PDF


• Simplifying Analyses by Fitting the Semantic Representation Closely to Language, in the proceedings of the AAAI Fall 1994 Symposium on Knowledge Representation for Natural Language Processing in Implemented Systems, November 4-6, 1994, New Orleans.


• Trade-offs Between Syntactic and Semantic Processing in the Comprehension of Real Texts, in the proceedings of RIAO-94.


• Reversible NLP by Linking the Grammar to the Knowledge Base, in Strzalkowski (ed), Reversible Grammar in Natural Language Processing, Kluwer Academic, pp. 257-291, 1994 PDF This is a revision of Reversible NLP by Deriving the Grammars from the Knowledge Base, in the proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Reversible Grammar in NLP, June 17, 1991, Berkeley, pp. 40-44. ACL Anthology


• Internal and External Evidence in the Identification and Semantic Categorization of Proper Names, in the proceedings of the SIGLEX workshop Acquisition of Lexical Knowledge from Text, at the ACL meeting June 21, 1993, pgs. 32-43 ACL Anthology; revised version in Boguraev and Pustejovsky (eds), Corpus Processing for Lexical Acquisition, MIT Press, 1996, pgs. 21-40.


• The Interplay of Syntactic and Semantic Node Labels in Partial Parsing, in the proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Parsing Technologies, August 10-13, 1993 Tilburg, The Netherlands, pp. 171-186; revised version in Bunt and Tomita (eds), Recent Advances in Parsing Technology, Kluwer Academic Publishers, pgs. 295-323. PDF


• Semantic Labels on Syntactic Constituents as a means for Incremental, Deterministic Language Parsing and Understanding, poster given at the CUNY Meeting on the Psychology of Sentence Processing, March 13-15, 1993.


• An Efficient Chart-based Algorithm for Partial-Parsing of Unrestricted Texts, in the proceedings of the 3d Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing (ACL), Trento, Italy, April 1992, pp. 193-200. ACL Anthology, PDF


• Robust Partial-Parsing through Incremental, Multi-level Processing, in Jacobs (ed) Text-based Intelligent Systems, Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 83-99, 1992; revised from a paper presented at the AAAI Symposium on Text-based Intelligent Systems, March 27-29, 1990, Stanford University. PDF


• John Clippinger & David McDonald, Why Good Writing is Easier to Understand, IJCAI-83, August 8-12, 1983, Karslruhe West Germany, pp. 730-732.

Contents, Home

Natural Language Generation

• Charles F. Greenbacker, Kathleen F, McCoy, Sandra Carberry, and David McDonald, Semantic modeling of multimodal documents for abstractive summarization, in Automatic Text Summarization, 2011, 29 pgs. PDF


• Flexibility counts more than precision, position paper for the Workshop on Shared Tasks and Comparative Evaluation in Natural Language Generation, April 20-21, 2007, Arlington Virginia, organized by Michael White and Robert Dale. PDF, Slides


• Computational Linguistics -- Generation, in the Enclyclopedia of Linguistics, Philipp Strazny (ed.), Fitzroy Dearborn, New York, 2005, 2 pgs. PDF


• Producing Dialog at MERL: problems in generation engineering, in Natural Language Generation in Spoken and Written Dialog: papers from the 2003 AAAI Spring Symposium, AAAI Press Technical Report SS-03-06, pp. 104-111. PDF


• Natural Language Generation, chapter 7 of Dale, Moisl, & Somers (eds.) Handbook of Natural Language Processing, Marcel Dekker, 2000, pp. 147-180.
  Updated in 2009 for the 2d edition, Indurka & Damerau (eds.), CRC Press, chapter 6, pp. 121-143. PDF


• A Rational Reconstruction of Genaro, in the proceedings of the RAGS Workshop, November 12-13, 1999, Edinburgh. PDF


• Controlled realization of complex objects by reversing the output of a parser, in proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Natural Language Generation, Niagra-on-the-Lake, Ontario, August 5-7, 1998, pp. 38-47. PDF


• David McDonald & Federica Busa, On the Creative Use of Language: the form of lexical resources, in the proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Natural Language Generation, Kennebunkport Maine, pp. 81-89. ACL Anthology, PDF


• Natural Language Generation, in the Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Pergamon Press, 1993.


• Issues in the Choice of a Source for Natural Language Generation, Computational Linguistics, 19(1), March 1993, pp. 191-197. ACL Anthology


• Does Natural Language Generation Start from a Specification, in Zock & Horacek (eds) New Concepts in Natural Language Generation: Planning, Realization, Systems, Pinter, London 1993, pgs. 275-278. PDF


• Forward to Marie Meteer, Expressibility and the Problem of Efficient Text Planning, Pinter, London, 1992.


• Type-Driven Suppression of Redundancy in the Generation of Inference-Rich Reports, in the proceedings of the 6th Intl. Workshop for Natural Language Generation, Trento, Italy, April 1992, Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence #587, pp. 73-88.


• What is Decided and What Just Happens, workshop on Decision Making throughout the Generation Process, held in conjunction with IJCAI-91, August 24-25, 1991, Sydney Australia, 4 pgs. PDF


• Marie Meteer & David McDonald, Evaluation for Generation, in the proceedings of the Workshop on Evaluating Natural Language Processing Systems, June 18, 1991, Berkeley; published as Technical Report RL-TR-91-362, Rome Laboratory, Griffiss Air Force Base, NY 12441-5700, pp. 127-131.


• One Tree -- One Unit: a hypothesis for the conceptual sources underlying generation, Computational Intelligence 7(4) winter 1991, pp. 361-362. PDF


• David McDonald & Marie Meteer, The Implications of Tree Adjoining Grammar for Generation, in the proceedings of the 1st Intl. Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammar: Formal Theory and Application, Dagstuhl Castle Intl. Conference and Research Center for Computer Science, August 15-17, 1990, pp. 71-79 organized by Wahlster & Harbusch, DFKI, Stuhlsatzenausweg 3, D-6600 Saarbruchen 11, Germany.


• On the Place of Words in the Generation Process, in Paris, Swartout & Mann (eds) Natural Language Generation in Artificial Intelligence and Computational Linguistics, Kluwer Academic, Boston, 1991, pp. 229-248; revised from a paper presented at the 4th Intl. Workshop on Natural Language Generation, Catalina Island (ISI/USC), July 17-21, 1988. PDF


• Preface to Advances in Natural Language Generation, Michael Zock & G. Sabah (eds.), Pinter Publishers Ltd., London, 1988


• AI Research in Natural Language Generation, Final Report, Rome Air Development Center, 1988. PDF


• Eduard Hovy, David McDonald & Sheryl Young, Current Issues in Natural Language Generation: An overview of the AAAI Workshop on Text Planning and Realization, AI Magazine 10(3), Fall 1989, pp. 27-29.


• Modularity in natural language generation: Methodological issues, in Hovy, McDonald & Young (eds), Proceedings of the AAAI Workshop on Text Planning and Realization, AAAI, 1988, pp. 91-98. PDF


• Penelope Sibun, Alison Huettner & David McDonald, Directing the Generation of Living Space Descriptions, COLING-88, Budapest, Hungary, pp. 626-629. ACL Anthology, PDF


• David McDonald & Marie Meteer, From Water to Wine: generating natural language texts from today's applications programs, 1988 Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing (ACL), Austin, Texas February 9-12, 1988, pp. 41-48. ACL Anthology


• Introduction to David McDonald & Lenard Bolc (editors) Natural Language Generation Systems, Springer-Verlag, New York, 1988. Amazon


• Marie Meteer, David McDonald, Scott Anderson, David Forster, Linda Gay, Alison Huettner & Penelope Sibun, Mumble-86: Design and Implementation, TR #87-87 Dept. Computer & Information Science, UMass., September 1987, 174 pgs.


• Alison Huettner, Marie Vaughan, & David McDonald, Constraints on the Generation of Adjunct Clauses, ACL-87, Stanford University, July 6-9, 1987, pp. 207-214. ACL Anthology


• No Better, but no Worse than People, position paper for the panel on natural language generation, TINLAP III, University New Mexico, January 7-9, 1987, pp. 200-205; reprinted in Wilks (ed) Theoretical Issues in Natural Language Processing, Erlbaum, 1989, pp. 194-198. ACL Anthology


• David McDonald, Marie Meteer & James Pustejovsky, Factors Contributing to Efficiency in Natural Language Generation, in Kempen (ed.) Natural Language Generation: Recent Advances in Artificial Intelligence, Psychology, and Linguistics, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 1987, pp. 159-181. PDF


• Natural Language Generation: Complexities and Techniques, in Nirenburg (ed.) Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation, Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 192-224.


• Natural Language Generation, in Shapiro (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence, John Wiley & Sons, pp. 642-655, 1987.


• Marie Vaughan & David McDonald, The Writing Process as a Model for Natural Language Generation, ACL-86 Columbia University, June 10-13, 1986, pp. 90-96. ACL Anthology


• David McDonald & James Pustejovsky, Description-Directed Natural Language Generation, IJCAI-85, UCLA, August, 18-23, 1985, pp. 799-805. PDF


• Surface Generation for a Variety of Applications, National Computer Conference 85, Chicago, July 15-19, 1985, pp. 105-110.


• David McDonald & James Pustejovsky, TAG's as a Grammatical Formalism for Generation, ACL-85, University of Chicago, July 8-12 1985, pp. 94-103. ACL Anthology·


• David McDonald & James Pustejovsky, A Computational Theory of Prose Style for Natural Language Generation, ACL (European chapter), University of Geneva, March 28-30, 1985, pp. 86-94. ACL Anthology


• Real-time Generation: An Overview of MUMBLE, extended abstract of a presentation at the 1st Intl. Workshop on Natural Language Generation, August 15-17, 1983, Burg Stettenfels, West Germany; proceedings prepared by the Institute fur Informatik, University of Stuttgart.


• Why to use a full-scale natural language generation system, extended abstract in the report on the Workshop on Automated Explanation Production, UCLA Idylwild Campus, June 7-8, 1982; published in the ACM SIGART Newsletter #10, July, 1983, pg. 10.


• Beverly Woolf & David McDonald, Generating Text for a PASCAL Tutor, Conference on Computer-Human Interaction, December, 15-18, 1983, Boston, pp. 230-234.


• Jeffery Conklin, Kate Erlich, & David McDonald, An Empirical Investigation of Visual Salience and Its Role in Text Generation, Cognition and Brain Theory, 6(2) Spring 1983, pp. 197-225.


• Description Directed Control: Its implications for natural language generation, International Journal of Computers and Mathematics, 9(1) Spring, 1983, pp. 403-424; whole issue reprinted as Computational Linguistics, Cercone (ed.), Plenum Press, 1984; article later reprinted in Grosz, Spark-Jones & Webber (eds.) Readings in Natural Language Processing, Morgan Kaufmann, 1986, pp. 519-537.


• Natural Language Generation as a Computational Problem: an introduction, in Brady & Berwick (eds.) Computational Models of Discourse, MIT Press, 1983, pp. 209-266.


• David McDonald & Jeff Conklin, Salience as a Simplifying Metaphor for Natural Language Generation, AAAI-82, August 18-20, 1982, Carnegie-Mellon University, pp. 75-78.


• Jeff Conklin & David McDonald Salience: The Key to Selection in Deep Generation, ACL-82, June 16-18, 1982, University of Toronto, pp. 129-135. ACL Anthology


• Mann, William, Lynn Bates, Barbara Grosz, David McDonald, Kathleen McKeown,& William Swartout, Text Generation: the State of the Art and the Literature, USC-ISI Technical Report ISI/RR-81-101, 1981.


• MUMBLE: A Flexible System for Language Production, IJCAI-81, University of British Columbia, August 24-28, 1981, pg. 1062.


• Language Production: the Source of the Dictionary, ACL-81, Stanford University, June 29 - July 1, 1981, pp. 57-62. ACL Anthology


• Natural Language Production as a Process of Decision-making under Constraints, unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, August 1980.


• A Linear-time Model of Language Production: Some Psychological Implications, ACL-80, University of Pennsylvania, June, 1980, pp. 55-57. ACL Anthology


• The Role of Discourse Structure in Language Production, CSCSI-80, University of Victoria, British Columbia, May, 1980. pp. 143-150.


• Preface to a Psycholinguistic Model of Language Generation, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, working paper 193, July, 1979.


• Subsequent Reference: syntactic and rhetorical constraints, TINLAP II, University of Illinois, July 10-14, 1978, pp. 38-47. ACL Anthology


• How MUMBLE translated the Barber Proof: a description very close to the code, circulated manuscript, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, January 1978.


• Language Generation: Automatic Control of Grammatical Detail, COLING-78, Bergen Norway, August, 1978, pp. 52-55.


• A Simultaneously Procedural and Declarative Data Structure and its Use in Natural Language Generation, CSCSI-78, University of Toronto, July 5-7, 1978, pp. 38-47.


• Language Generation: the Linguistic Component, IJCAI-77, MIT, August, 1977, pp. 142.


• The Design of a Program for Generating Natural Language, unpublished Master's Thesis, MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, January 1976.


• A Framework for Writing Generation Grammars for Interactive Computer Programs, ACL-75, October 30 - November 1, MIT 1975; published in the microfiche journal American Journal of Computational Linguistics, microfiche 33.


• A Preliminary Report on a Program for Generating Natural Language, IJCAI-75, Tibilisi USSR, August, 1975, pp. 401-405.


• Conversations Between Programs, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, working paper 76, May 1974. PDF

Contents, Home

Semantic Representation and World Modeling

Interacting Naturally in Virtual Environments, by David Diller, Robert Stark, Brian Krisler, David McDonald, Richart Shapiro, and Kerry Moffitt, in the proceedings of the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation, and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) 2010. PDF
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• The View from the Trenches: Issues in the Ontology of Restricted Domains, in FOIS'01: Formal Ontology in Information Systems, Collected Papers from the Second International Conference, The Cliff House, Ogunquit, Maine, published by ACM Press, October 17-19, 2001, pp. 104-111.


• Issues in the Representation of Real Texts: The Design of KRISP, in Iwanska & Shapiro (eds.) Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Representation: Language for Knowledge and Knowledge for Language, MIT Press, 2000, pp. 77-110.


• Lexical Discontinuities in the Functional Meaning of Words, in the working notes of the IJCAI Workshop on Multilingual Text Generation, August 20-21, 1995, Montreal, pp. 110-118.


• Simplifying Analyses by Fitting the Semantic Representation Closely to Language, in the proceedings of the AAAI Fall 1994 Symposium on Knowledge Representation for Natural Language Processing in Implemented Systems, November 4-6, 1994, New Orleans.


• KRISP: a representation for the semantic interpretation of real texts, Mind and Machines , (4) pp.59-73, 1994. PDF


• Bruce Leban, David McDonald & David Forster, A Representation for Collections of Temporal Intervals, AAAI-86, University of Pennsylvania pp. 367-371. PDF


• The Modern Consensus on Semantic Representations for use in Story Understanding, in G. Tonfoni (ed.) QRL-6 Artificial Intelligence and Text-Understanding: Plot Units and Summarization Procedures, Edizion Zara, Parma Italy, 1985, pp. 129-152.


• Alan Borning, Doug Lenat, David McDonald, Craig Taylor, & Stephen Weyer, Knoesphere: Building Expert Systems with Encyclopedic Knowledge, IJCAI-83, August 8-12, 1983, Karslruhe West Germany, pp. 167-169.


• Jeff Conklin & David McDonald, Spatial Relationships in KL-ONE, 2d KL-ONE Workshop, Report No. 4842, Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., June 1982, pp. 157-159.

Contents, Home

Discourse

• David McDonald, JoAnn Brooks, Beverly Woolf & Philip Werner, Transition Networks for Discourse Management, TR #86-34, Dept. Computer & Information Science, UMass., April 1986.


• David McDonald & James Pustejovsky "The Counselor Project at the University of Massachusetts", Computational Linguistics 12(2), Summer 1986, Finite String Newsletter, pp. 139-141. PDF


• Beverly Woolf & David McDonald "Understanding Discourse Conventions in Tutoring", Expert Systems in Government, McLean Virginia, October 23-25, 1985, pp. 145-156.


• Beverly Woolf & David McDonald "Context-Dependent Transition in Tutoring Discourse", AAAI-84, University of Texas at Austin, August 6-10, 1984, pp. 355-361.

Contents, Home

Eclectic pieces

• Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence: methodological cross-fertilization, in the collected papers from the plenary session of the Symposium on Language Technology, April 1, 1985, Tilburg University, The Netherlands, Foris Publications, Dordrecht, 1990


• Recovering the Speaker's Decisions during Mechanical Translation, Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation of Natural Languages, Colgate Univ., August, 14-16, 1985, pp. 183-199.


• Malcolm Cook, Wendy Lehnert, & David McDonald, Conveying Implicit Context in Narrative Summaries, COLING-84, Stanford University, July 2-6, 1984, pp. 5-7. ACL Anthology


• David McDonald & John Clippinger, Artificial Intelligence Computers and Software: Technology and Market Trends, Brattle Research Corporation, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1984.


• Beverly Woolf & David McDonald, Building a Computer Tutor: Design Issues, IEEE Computer 17(9), September, 1984, pp. 61-73; reprinted in the AEDS Monitor 23(9), pp. 10-18.


• Conversations Between Programs, in Vainya & Hintikka (eds.) Cognitive Constraints on Com-munications, D. Reidel, Dortrecht, Holland, 1984, pp. 403-424.


• Recommendations for Application of AI to Systems Control Problems in the Defense Communications Agency, report for a panel of the same name organized by RADC, Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, June 28-30, 1983.


• The State of the Art in Natural Language Processing, in Artificial Intelligence and Fifth Generation Computer Technologies, Multiclient Study, Brattle Research Corporation Cambridge Massachusetts, April, 1982, pp. 63-103.


• An Evaluation of the Potentials for Computer-Generated Movies, study done for Film Research Associates Ltd., September, 1977.