Using a Textual Representational Level Component in the Context of Discourse or Dialogue Generation

A natural language generation system is typically constituted by two main components: a content planning component (e.g., text planner or dialogue act planner) and a linguistic realization component. But, this is not suucient since, on the one hand, the message built by the content planning component is generally not adequately detailed in order to control the many possibilities for its expression and, on the other hand, the content planner cannot innuence the way in which the message will be verbalized. Generation systems require a third component, called the micro-planning (or sentence planning or phrasing) component, which acts as an intermediary between the pragmatico-semantic level and the purely syntactic level. The micro-planner is responsible for transforming the message into a textual structure. For this transformation to be achieved, grammatical and lexical resources must be selected.