Formal and Natural Language Generation in the Mercury Conversational System1

This paper describes the generation component of our MERCURY flight reservation conversational system. Generation makes use of the GENESIS-II generation server, which represents a significant redesign from its predecessor, GENESIS. While the main focus is on response generation, we also discuss a variety of other generation needs that are fulfilled by GENESIS-II. These include a paraphrase of the user query back into English and into a flattened electronic form, the paraphrase of the electronic form into a database query language, and the conversion of flight tables into HTML format.