| Figures | |
| Preface | |
| 1 | Introduction | 1 |
| 1.1 | The Research Perspective | 2 |
| 1.2 | The Applications Perspective | 4 |
| 1.3 | Some Example NLG Systems | 7 |
| 1.4 | A Short History of NLG | 19 |
| 1.5 | The Structure of This Book | 20 |
| 2 | National Language Generation in Practice | 23 |
| 2.2 | When Are NLG Techniques Appropriate? | 24 |
| 2.3 | Using a Corpus to Determine User Requirements | 30 |
| 2.4 | Evaluating NLG Systems | 37 |
| 2.5 | Fielding NLG Systems | 38 |
| 3 | The Architecture of a Natural Language Generation System | 41 |
| 3.2 | The Inputs and Outputs of Natural Language Generation | 42 |
| 3.3 | An Informal Characterisation of the Architecture | 47 |
| 3.4 | The Architecture and Its Representations | 59 |
| 3.5 | Other Architectures | 72 |
| 4 | Document Planning | 79 |
| 4.2 | Representing Information in the Domain | 83 |
| 4.3 | Content Determination | 95 |
| 4.4 | Document Structuring | 101 |
| 4.5 | Document Planner Architecture | 110 |
| 5 | Microplanning | 114 |
| 5.2 | Lexicalisation | 124 |
| 5.3 | Aggregation | 132 |
| 5.4 | Generating Referring Expressions | 144 |
| 5.5 | Limitations and Other Approaches | 156 |
| 6 | Surface Realisation | 159 |
| 6.2 | Realising Text Specifications | 162 |
| 6.3 | Varieties of Phrase Specifications | 164 |
| 6.4 | KPML | 171 |
| 6.5 | SURGE | 179 |
| 6.6 | RealPro | 186 |
| 6.7 | Choosing a Realiser | 192 |
| 6.8 | Bidirectional Grammars | 194 |
| 7 | Beyond Text Generation | 198 |
| 7.2 | Typography | 201 |
| 7.3 | Integrating Text and Graphics | 208 |
| 7.4 | Hypertex | 216 |
| 7.5 | Speech Output | 221 |
| App | NLG Systems Mentioned in This Book | 229 |
| References | 231 |
| Index | 243 |