Location via proxy:   [ UP ]  
[Report a bug]   [Manage cookies]                
skip to main content
article

Building applied natural language generation systems

Published: 01 March 1997 Publication History

Abstract

In this article, we give an overview of Natural Language Generation (NLG) from an applied system-building perspective. The article includes a discussion of when NLG techniques should be used; suggestions for carrying out requirements analyses; and a description of the basic NLG tasks of content determination, discourse planning, sentence aggregation, lexicalization, referring expression generation, and linguistic realisation. Throughout, the emphasis is on established techniques that can be used to build simple but practical working systems now. We also provide pointers to techniques in the literature that are appropriate for more complicated scenarios.

References

[1]
Adorni, G. and Zock, M. (eds.) (1996) Trends in Natural Language Generation: Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence. Berlin: Springer.
[2]
Allen, J. and Perrault, C. (1980) Analyzing intention in utterances. Artificial Intelligence 15: 143-178.
[3]
Appelt, D. (1985) Planning English referring expressions. Artificial Intelligence 26: 1-33.
[4]
Aust, H., Oerder, M., Seide, F. and Steinbiss, V. (1995) The Philips automatic train timetable information system. Speech Communication 17: 249-262.
[5]
Bateman, J. (1996) KPML Development Environment. Technical Report, IPSI, GMD, Darmstadt, Germany.
[6]
Buchanan, B., Moore, J., Forsythe, D., Carenini, G., Banks, G. and Ohlsson, S. (1995) An intelligent interactive system for delivering individualized information to patients. Artificial Intelligence in Medicine 7: 117-154.
[7]
Busemann, S. (1996) Best-first surface realization. In Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Natural Language Generation, pp. 101-110.
[8]
Caldwell, D. and Korelsky, T. (1994) Bilingual generation of job descriptions from quasi-conceptual forms. In Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Applied Natural-Language Processing, pp. 1-6. Association for Computational Linguistics.
[9]
Cawsey, A., Binsted, K. and Jones, R. (1995) Personalised explanations for patient education. In Proceedings of the 5th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation, pp. 59-74.
[10]
Coch, J. (1996) Evaluating and comparing three text production techniques. In Proceedings of COLING-1996.
[11]
Dale, R. (1992) Generating Referring Expressions: Building Descriptions in a Domain of Objects and Processes. Cambridge: MIT Press.
[12]
Dale, R., Mellish, C. and Zock, M., editors (1990) Current Research in Natural Language Generation. London: Academic Press.
[13]
Dale, R., Hovy, E., Rösner, D. and Stock, O., editors (1992) Aspects of Automated Natural Language Generation: Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence. Berlin: Springer.
[14]
Dale, R. and Reiter, E. (1995) Computational interpretations of the Gricean maxims in the generation of referring expressions. Cognitive Science 19: 233-263.
[15]
Dalianis, H. and Hovy, E. (1996) Aggregation in natural language generation. In: G. Adorni and M. Zock, editors, Trends in Natural Language Generation, pp. 88-105. Berlin: Springer.
[16]
Elhadad, M. and Robin, J. (1996) An overview of SURGE: a reusable comprehensive syntactic realisation component. In Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Natural Language Generation (Demos and Posters), pp. 1-4.
[17]
Geldof, S. and Van de Velde, W. (1997) An architecture for template based (hyper)text generation. In Proceedings of the 6th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation, pp. 28-37.
[18]
Goldberg, E., Driedgar, N. and Kittredge, R. (1994) Using natural-language processing to produce weather forecasts. IEEE Expert 9: 45-53.
[19]
Goldman, N. (1975) Conceptual generation. In R. Schank (ed.), Conceptual Information Processing. New York: Elsevier.
[20]
Halliday, M. (1985) An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Edward Arnold.
[21]
Horacek, H. and Zock, M., editors (1993) New Concepts in Natural Language Generation. London: Pinter.
[22]
Hovy, E. (1993) Automated discourse generation using discourse structure relations. Artificial Intelligence 63: 341-386.
[23]
Iordanskaja, L., Kim, M., Kittredge, R., Lavoie, B. and Polguère, A. (1992) Generation of extended bilingual statistical reports. Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING-92), volume 3, pp. 1019-1023.
[24]
Kasper, R. (1989) A flexible interface for linking applications to Penman's sentence generator. Proceedings of the 1989 DARPA Speech and Natural Language Workshop, pp. 153-158.
[25]
Kempen, G., editor (1987) Natural Language Generation. Martinus Nijhoff.
[26]
Kittredge, R., Korelsky, T. and Rambow, O. (1991) On the need for domain communication knowledge. Computational Intelligence 7: 305-314.
[27]
Kosslyn, S. (1994) Elements of Graphic Design. New York: W. H. Freeman.
[28]
Lavioe, B. and Rambow, O. (1997) A Fast and Portable Realizer for Text Generation Systems. Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing, pp. 265-268.
[29]
Maier, E. and Hovy, E. (1993) Organising discourse structure relations using metafunctions. In: H. Horacek and M. Zock, editors, New Concepts in Natural Language Generation, pp. 69-86. London: Pinter.
[30]
Mann, W. and Thompson, S. (1988) Rhetorical structure theory: toward a functional theory of text organization. Text 3: 243-281.
[31]
Marchant, B., Cerbah, F. and Mellish, C. (1996) The Ghost Writer Project: A demonstration of the use of AI techniques in the production of technical publications. Proceedings of Expert Systems 1996: Applications Stream, pp. 9-25.
[32]
Matthiessen, C. (1991) Lexico(grammatical) choice in text generation. In: C. Paris, W. Swartout and W. Mann, editors, Natural Language Generation in Artificial Intelligence and Computational Linguistics, pp. 249-292. Kluwer Academic.
[33]
Matthiessen, C. and Bateman, J. (1991) Systemic Linguistics and Text Generation: Experiences from Japanese and English. London: Pinter.
[34]
Maybury, M. (ed.) (1993) Intelligent Multimedia Interfaces. AAAI Press.
[35]
McDonald, D. and Bolc, L., editors (1988) Natural Language Generation Systems. Berlin: Springer.
[36]
McKeown, K. (1985) Discourse strategies for generating natural-language text. Artificial Intelligence 27: 1-42.
[37]
McKeown, K., Kukich, K. and Shaw, J. (1994) Practical issues in automatic document generation. Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Applied Natural-Language Processing, pp. 7-14.
[38]
Mel'¿uk, I. (1988) Dependency Syntax: Theory and Practice. Albany: State University of New York Press.
[39]
Moore, J. and Paris, C. (1993) Planning text for advisory dialogues: capturing intentional and rhetorical information. Computational Linguistics 19: 651-694.
[40]
Nogier, J-F. and Zock, M. (1992) Lexical choice as pattern-matching. Knowledge-Based Systems 5: 200-212.
[41]
Paris, C., Vander Linden, K., Fischer, M., Hartley, A., Pemberton, L., Power, R. and Scott, D. (1995) A support tool for writing multilingual instructions. Proceedings of Fourteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 1398-1404.
[42]
Paris, C., Swartout, W. and Mann, W., editors (1991) Natural Language Generation in Artificial Intelligence and Computational Linguistics. Kluwer Academic.
[43]
Pressman, R. (1994) Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach. McGraw-Hill.
[44]
Quirk, R. and Greenbaum, S. (1972) A University Grammar of English. Longman.
[45]
Reiter, E. (1994) Has a consensus NL generation architecture appeared, and is it psycholin-guistically plausible? Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Natural Language Generation, pp. 163-170.
[46]
Reiter, E., Cawsey, A., Osman, L. and Roff, Y. (1997) Knowledge acquisition for content selection. Proceedings of the 6th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation, pp. 117-126.
[47]
Reiter, E., Mellish, C. and Levine, J. (1995) Automatic generation of technical documentation. Applied Artificial Intelligence 9: 259-287.
[48]
Scott, A., Clayton, S. and Gibson, F. (1991) A Practical Guide to Knowledge Acquisition. Addison-Wesley.
[49]
Shieber, S., van Noord, G., Pereira, F. and Moore, R. (1990) Semantic head-driven generation. Computational Linguistics 16: 30-42.
[50]
Springer, S., Buta, P. and Wolf, T. (1991) Automatic letter composition for customer service. In Proceedings of the Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference (CAIA-1991), pp. 67-83.
[51]
Stede, M. (1996) Lexical options in multilingual generation from a knowledge base. In: G. Adorni and M. Zock, editors, Trends in Natural Language Generation, pp. 222-237. Berlin: Springer.
[52]
Swartout. W. (1983) XPLAIN: a system for creating and explaining expert consulting systems. Artificial Intelligence 21: 285-325.
[53]
Zock, M. and Sabah, G., editors (1988) Advances in Natural Language Generation: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (two volumes). London: Pinter.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)ConSequenceProceedings of the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Thirty-Sixth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Fourteenth Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence10.1609/aaai.v38i14.29460(15355-15363)Online publication date: 20-Feb-2024
  • (2024)Knowledge Editing for Large Language Models: A SurveyACM Computing Surveys10.1145/369859057:3(1-37)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2024
  • (2024)Neural Methods for Data-to-text GenerationACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology10.1145/366063915:5(1-46)Online publication date: 8-May-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image Natural Language Engineering
Natural Language Engineering  Volume 3, Issue 1
March 1997
107 pages

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

United States

Publication History

Published: 01 March 1997

Qualifiers

  • Article

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)0
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Reflects downloads up to 08 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)ConSequenceProceedings of the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Thirty-Sixth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Fourteenth Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence10.1609/aaai.v38i14.29460(15355-15363)Online publication date: 20-Feb-2024
  • (2024)Knowledge Editing for Large Language Models: A SurveyACM Computing Surveys10.1145/369859057:3(1-37)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2024
  • (2024)Neural Methods for Data-to-text GenerationACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology10.1145/366063915:5(1-46)Online publication date: 8-May-2024
  • (2024)Unveiling Information Through Narrative In Conversational Information SeekingProceedings of the 6th ACM Conference on Conversational User Interfaces10.1145/3640794.3665884(1-6)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Generating Relevant Referring Expressions with GAIA: A Givenness Advised Incremental AlgorithmCompanion of the 2024 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction10.1145/3610978.3640631(545-548)Online publication date: 11-Mar-2024
  • (2024)CoSMo: A multilingual modular language for Content Selection ModellingProceedings of the 39th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing10.1145/3605098.3635889(706-713)Online publication date: 8-Apr-2024
  • (2024)AutoTitle: An Interactive Title Generator for VisualizationsIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2023.329024130:8(5276-5288)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2024
  • (2024)A Survey on Neural Data-to-Text GenerationIEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering10.1109/TKDE.2023.330438536:4(1431-1449)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2024
  • (2024)A comprehensive survey on applications of transformers for deep learning tasksExpert Systems with Applications: An International Journal10.1016/j.eswa.2023.122666241:COnline publication date: 1-May-2024
  • (2024)Automatic Logical Forms improve fidelity in Table-to-Text generationExpert Systems with Applications: An International Journal10.1016/j.eswa.2023.121869238:PDOnline publication date: 15-Mar-2024
  • Show More Cited By

View Options

View options

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media