Section VII – What are complements

As far as SimpleNLG is concerned, a complement is anything that comes after the verb. When you label something as a complement and hand it to simplenlg to be realized, SimpleNLG will place it, no matter what it is, after the verb [1]. If you've specified an object, it will place it after both the verb and the object.

Examples of complements are italicized in the sentences below:

1. Mary is happy.
2. Mary wrote the letter quickly.
3. Mary just realized that her holidays are over.

The italicized words and phrases in the examples above are all different parts of speech. In example #1, it's an adjective phrase; in example #2, it's an adverb; and it’s a ‘that-clause’ (complementiser phrase) in example #3. But from simplenlg’s point of view, the italicized bits all have one thing in common: they are complements and appear after the verb. Although it has an understanding of subjects, verbs, and objects, simplenlg has a very limited concept of adjective phrases that follow verbs, adverbial phrases, that-clauses, or other parts of speech that can appear after a verb. But it does understand the concept of a complement, and because of this, phrases that appear after a verb can be generated using the simplenlg library. As can be seen in Table 2, complements encompass a variety of phrase types. (For a full listing of Parts of Speech simplenlg can handle, see Table 1.)

Complements can be added to sentences via the addComplement method. For example, given our subject, object, and verb:

    p.setSubject("Mary");
    p.setVerb("chase");
    p.setObject("the monkey");

We can then add any kind of complement:

    p.addComplement("very quickly"); // Adverb phrase, passed as a string
    p.addComplement("despite her exhaustion"); // Prepositional phrase, string

Which will generate:

    Mary chases the monkey very quickly despite her exhaustion.

Note that only things of type SPhraseSpec can take a complement. Nouns and verbs take modifiers, which we discuss next.

→ For more examples on complements, look at testsrc/FPTest.java.

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[1] Even if you label a nonsense string like "shabadoo" as a complement, simplenlg will happily add it after the verb.