📄 Current Research in Natural Language Generation

Summary

This item is not an original study. It is Ingrid Zukerman's review of an edited volume, Current Research in Natural Language Generation (Robert Dale, Chris Mellish, Michael Zock, eds., Academic Press, 1990). The book gathers revised versions of papers presented at the second European workshop on natural language generation, held in Edinburgh in April 1989, and surveys NLG work of that period, with a European focus. Zukerman reviews eleven chapters grouped into four parts: text planning, linguistic realization, building descriptions, and connectionist approaches. For each chapter she outlines the core idea and notes weaknesses, mostly in presentation: inconsistent notation, missing worked examples, unimplemented heuristics, or absent implementation statistics. Her overall verdict is positive. She judges the chapters substantial and finds the mix of position papers, full-system descriptions and component studies well balanced. She notes two gaps: no nontechnical domains such as story generation, and no coverage of Systemic Grammars. She also sees a consensus forming around schemas and RST for content planning and unification-based grammars for realization. The review is useful as a map of early NLG research.

Key points

• The volume has 356 pages and four sections: 4 text-planning papers, 2 realization papers, 3 description papers and 2 connectionist papers.
• Text planning:
  • Hovy lists seven open problems in paragraph planning from an RST perspective.
  • Scott & de Souza propose psycholinguistically motivated heuristics for realizing RST relations.
  • Cawsey describes an interactive explanatory planner that adapts to the user.
  • McKeown et al. present COMET, which uses FUF for its media coordinator, lexical interface and grammatical realization.
• Realization:
  • van Noord analyzes head-driven bottom-up generation.
  • De Smedt's IPF builds on Segment Grammars and accepts conceptual input in arbitrary order.
• Descriptions:
  • Horacek describes a generator embedded in an advisory dialogue system.
  • Dale's Epicure produces recipes and refers to entities that change over time.
  • Reiter gives an algorithm for user-tailored object descriptions, with a complexity analysis.
• Connectionist:
  • Houghton models phoneme sequence recall through competitive queuing.
  • Kitano builds simultaneous English–Japanese interpretation by combining marker-passing with a connectionist network.