1 - Introduction

Summary

Natural language generation (nlg) is the subfield of artificial intelligence and computational linguistics that focuses on computer systems that can produce understandable texts in English or other human languages. Typically starting from some nonlinguistic representation of information as input, nlg systems use knowledge about language and the application domain to automatically produce documents, reports, explanations, help messages, and other kinds of texts.

nlg is both a fascinating area of research and an emerging technology with many real-world applications. As a research area, nlg brings a unique perspective on fundamental issues in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and human–computer interaction. These include questions such as how linguistic and domain knowledge should be represented and reasoned with, what it means for a text to be well written, and how information is best communicated between machine and human. From a practical perspective, nlg technology is capable of partially automating routine document creation, removing much of the drudgery associated with such tasks. It is also being used in the research laboratory, and we expect soon in real applications, to present and explain complex information to people who do not have the background or time required to understand the raw data. In the longer term, nlg is also likely to play an important role in human–computer interfaces and will allow much richer interaction with machines than is possible today.