Phrasal template

A phrasal template is a phrase-long collocation that contains one or several empty slots which may be filled by words to produce individual phrases. Often there are some restrictions on the grammatic category of the words allowed to fill particular slots. An example is the phrase "common stocks rose <Number> to <Number>", e.g., "common stocks rose 1.72 to 340.36".^[1]

Phrasal templates are akin to forms in which blanks are to be filled with data.

A word game utilizing phrasal templates is Mad Libs.

The notion is used in natural language processing systems^[2] and in language generators, such as application-oriented report generators.^[3][4]

A recently invented word, "snowclone," attempts to describe a special case of phrasal templates that "clone" popular clichés. For example, "pink is the new red", Quiet Is the New Loud and the multitudes were spawned by "Pink is the navy blue of India" according to the template "Y is the new X".

See also

• Computational humor; usage of phrasal templates for computer generation of jokes
• Phrase structure rules
• Joke template
• Snowclone

References

1. ^ Susan Armstrong (1994) Using Large Corpora, ISBN 0-262-51082-0, p. 149
2. ^ Joseph D. Becker, The phrasal lexicon, Proceedings of the 1975 workshop on Theoretical issues in natural language processing, June 10-13, 1975, Cambridge, Massachusetts, [1]
3. ^ Karen Kukich. "Knowledge-Based Report Generation: A Knowledge Engineering Approach to Natural Language Report Generation." Ph.D. Thesis, Information Science Department, University of Pittsburgh, 1983.
4. ^ L. Boubeau, D. Carcagno, E. Goldberg, R. Kittredge, and A. Polguere. "Bilingual generation of weather forecasts in an operations environment." In Proceedings of the 13 th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING-90), Volume 1, pages 9—92, Helsinki, 1990.

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