The jsRealB Text Realizer: Organization and Use Cases -- Revised version (2012.15425v2)

Abstract: This paper describes the design principles behind jsRealB (Version 4.0), a surface realizer written JavaScript for English or French sentences from a specification inspired by the constituent syntax formalism but for which a dependency-based input notation is also available. jsRealB can be used either within a web page or as a node.js module. We show that the seemingly simple process of text realization involves many interesting implementation challenges in order to take into account the specifics of each language. jsRealB has a large coverage of English and French and has been used to develop realistic data-to-text applications and to reproduce existing literary texts and sentences from Universal Dependency annotations. Its source code and that of its applications are available on GitHub. The port of this approach to Python (pyrealb) is also presented.