A Simple Domain-Independent Probabilistic Approach to Generation

We present a simple, robust generation system which performs content selection and surface realization in a unified, domain-independent framework. In our approach, we break up the end-to-end generation process into a sequence of local decisions, arranged hierarchically and each trained discriminatively. We deployed our system in three different domains—Robocup sportscasting, technical weather forecasts, and common weather forecasts, obtaining results comparable to state-ofthe-art domain-specific systems both in terms of BLEU scores and human evaluation.