Natural Language Generation
Natural Language Generation (NLG) is the natural language processing task of generating natural language from a machine representation system such as a knowledge base or a logical form. Psycholinguists prefer the term language production when such formal representations are interpreted as models for mental representations.
It could be said an NLG system is like a translator that converts a computer based representation into a natural language representation. However, the methods to produce the final language are different from those of a compiler due to the inherent expressivity of natural languages.
NLG may be viewed as the opposite of natural language understanding: whereas in natural language understanding the system needs to disambiguate the input sentence to produce the machine representation language, in NLG the system needs to make decisions about how to put a concept into words.
Simple examples are systems that generate form letters. These do not typically involve grammar rules, but may generate a letter to a consumer, e.g. stating that a credit card spending limit was reached. More complex NLG systems dynamically create texts to meet a communicative goal. As in other areas of natural language processing, this can be done using either explicit models of language (e.g., grammars) and the domain, or using statistical models derived by analysing human-written texts.
A source for the SIGGEN portion of the ACL Anthology. A specialist textbook is Reiter and Dale (2000), but this does not describe developments in the field since 2000.
Read more about Natural Language Generation: Example, Stages, Applications, Evaluation
Famous quotes containing the words natural, language and/or generation:
“The image cannot be dispossessed of a primordial freshness, which idea can never claim. An idea is derivative and tamed. The image is in the natural or wild state, and it has to be discovered there, not put there, obeying its own law and none of ours. We think we can lay hold of image and take it captive, but the docile captive is not the real image but only the idea, which is the image with its character beaten out of it.”
—John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974)
“We have tried so hard to adulterate our hearts, and have so greatly abused the microscope to study the hideous excrescences and shameful warts which cover them and which we take pleasure in magnifying, that it is impossible for us to speak the language of other men.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“I do not mean to imply that the good old days were perfect. But the institutions and structure—the web—of society needed reform, not demolition. To have cut the institutional and community strands without replacing them with new ones proved to be a form of abuse to one generation and to the next. For so many Americans, the tragedy was not in dreaming that life could be better; the tragedy was that the dreaming ended.”
—Richard Louv (20th century)