Aspects of Natural Language Generation

Natural language generation is a knowledge-intensive, goal-directed process involving many interacting choices. Some questions that a generation system must answer include: what information needs to be included in the output to satisfy the speaker's or writer's communicative goals? how should a discourse contribution be structured to ensure its coherence? which modalities should be used to maximize the information exchange? how can output be tailored to speciic users? In this paper, we examine some aspects of natural language generation that constrain the planning process, including theories of discourse structure, models of discourse context and of users, and multimodal generation.