--8- 3. DATA CO~VERSION PROGRAM The paragraph generator is written in PI/I and run on the IBM 360 Model 65. It consists of two main programs: a data conversion program and a generation program. These two programs run as separate jobs. The data conversion program converts the language materials described above into compact data tables with associative links. The converted data are stored on a magnetic tape which is used as input to the generation program. During the process of paragraph generation it is desirable that the language data described in the preced- ing section remain in core storage. However, since the data base is rather l~rge, its conversion into a more compact and flexible form is desirable so that storage requirements and access time can be reduced. In view o£ the characteristics of the language data and the generation algorithm (to be described latex), we structure the data base in the following way. s. Words belonging to the same parts of speech or semantic classes are stored in consecutive locations. In the process of generation, random selection of a word from a part of speech or a semantic class is often re-- quired. If words are grouped together in form of a table, a randomly selected number in a proper range can be used as an index to look up the word from the table.