Exploiting a probabilistic hierarchical model for generation

Previous stochastic approaches to generation do not include a tree-based representation of syntax. While this may be adequate or even advantageous for some applications, other applications profit from using as much syntactic knowledge as is available, leaving to a stochastic model only those issues that are not determined by the grammar. We present initial results showing that a tree-based model derived from a tree-annotated corpus improves on a tree model derived from an unannotated corpus, and that a tree-based stochastic model with a hand-crafted grammar outperforms both.