[developers] ICONS and generation

[Ann Copestake]

I'm part way through getting ICONS support working in Lisp, testing on 
the version of the ERG available as trunk. I have a question about 
generation.  If I implemented the behaviour described in 
http://moin.delph-in.net/IconsSpecs there doesn't seem to be a way of 
specifying that I want a `normal' ordering for English.

e.g., if I take the MRS resulting from

that dog, the cat chased.

without ICONS check, there are 5 realizations, including the `null 
ICONS' case `The cat chased that dog.'  With an exact ICONS check, I can 
select realizations with the same ICONS (modulo order of ICONS elements, 
of course, in the case where there's more than one element).  But with 
the http://moin.delph-in.net/IconsSpecs behaviour, there's no way of 
specifying I want a `normal' order - if I don't give an ICONS, I will 
always get the 5 realisations. In fact, as I understand it, I can always 
end up with more icons in the realisation than in the input, as long as 
I can match the ones in the input.

So:
- is the IConsSpec behaviour what is desired for the ERG (e.g., because 
one can rely on the realisation ranking to prefer the most `normal' order)?
- or does the ERG behave differently from Emily and Sanghoun's grammars, 
such that different generator behaviour is desirable? and if so, could 
we change things so we don't need different behaviours

Ann