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Control of Style with a Generative Grammar1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

Sheldon Klein
Sheldon Klein*
Affiliation:
Carnegie Institute of Technology; System Development Corporation
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Extract

1. Introduction. In the course of building an automatic essay-paraphrasing computer program it became apparent to me that certain quantitative features of style could be controlled in the paraphrasing process. This paper presents the results of several experiments in the control of two quantitative measures of style, frequency of occurrence of syntactic structures and frequency of occurrence of pronouns. The results suggest that any well-defined quantitative measure of style is subject to machine control.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 41 , Issue 4: October-December , December 1965 , pp. 619 - 631
Copyright
Copyright © 1965 by Linguistic Society of America

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References

1 This research is supported in part by Public Health Service Research Grant MH 07722, from the National Institute of Mental Health (to the Carnegie Institute of Technology).

2 Sheldon Klein, ‘Automatic paraphrasing in essay format’, Mechanical translation 8:3/4.68-83 (1965).

3 Ibid.

4 D. G. Hays, ‘Automatic language data processing’, Computer applications in the behavioral sciences (H. Borko, ed.; Englewood Cliffs, 1962).

5 H. Gaifman, ‘Dependency systems and phrase-structure systems’, The RAND Corporation memorandum P-2315, Santa Monica, California, 1961.

6 Z. S. Harris, ‘From morpheme to utterance’, Lg. 22.161-83 (1946).

7 V. H. Yngve, ‘A model and an hypothesis for language structure’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 104.444-6 (1960).

8 N. Chomsky, Syntactic structures ('s-Gravenhage, 1957).

9 Yngve, op.cit.

10 Klein, op.cit.; Klein, ‘Automatic decoding of written English’ (dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, June 1963); Klein and R. F. Simmons, ‘Syntactic dependence and the computer generation of coherent discourse’, Mechanical translation 7:2.50-61 (1963).

11 Klein and Simmons, ibid.; D. G. Hays, ‘Dependency theory: A formalism and some observations’, Lg. 40.525 (1964).

12 Klein, ‘Automatic paraphrasing in essay format’.

13 This information was punched on IBM cards; numerical codes represented the grammatical information. The cards were read onto a tape, which served as the input to the program. There were no restrictions on the spacing of the information except that at least one blank space must occur between lexical item and grammar code. The information for a single sentence can be spread over several cards when necessary. A lexical item and its associated grammatical code could appear on different cards without affecting the program.

14 Klein, ibid.; S. M. Lamb, ‘The sememic approach to structural semantics’, Transcultural studies in cognition 57-78 (A. K. Romney and R. G. D'Andrade, eds.; American anthropologist 66:3 part 2, 1964).