1.1 The Problem This paper addresses the question \why and how is it that we say the same thing di erently to di erent people, or even to the same person in di erent circumstances? " We vary the

This paper describes PEBA-II, a working natural language generation system which interactively describes animals in a taxonomic knowledge base via the production of World Wide Web pages. Our aim is to construct a natural language document generation system with real practical applicability: to this end, the system reconstructs and combines a number of existing ideas in the literature in a novel way, and proposes a solution to the problem of breadth of coverage that is based on a pragmatic approach to knowledge representation and linguistic realisation. The system embodies the following features: ffl a reconstruction of some of the core ideas in schema--based text generation [McKeown 1985], applied to the generation of hypertext documents; ffl the principled use of a phrasal lexicon to ease surface generation, in concert with a knowledge base whose elements may correspond to pre--compiled collections of atomic units; ffl a user model and discourse model that permit interesting varia...

This thesis develops a new approach to automatic language generation that focuses on the need to produce a range of different paraphrases from the same input representation. One novelty of the system is its solidly grounding representations of word meaning in a background knowledge base, which enables the production of paraphrases stemming from certain inferences, rather than from purely lexical relationships alone. The system is designed in such a way that the paraphrasing mechanism extends naturally to a multilingual generator; specifically, we will be concerned with producing English and German sentences. The focus of the system is on lexical paraphrases, and one of the contributions of the thesis is in identifying, analyzing and extending relevant linguistic research so that it can be used to handle...

Current research in natural language generation is situated in a computational linguistics tradition that was founded several decades ago. We critically analyse some of the architectural assumptions underlying existing systems and point out some problems in the domains of text planning and lexicalization. Guided by the identification of major generation challenges viewed from the angles of knowledge-based systems and cognitive psychology, we sketch some new directions for future research.

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This paper describes the use of a system of semantic rules to generate noun compounds, vague or polysemous words, and cases of metonymy. The rules are bidirectional and are used by the understanding system to interpret the same constructions.

While the World Wide Web sets the scene for the future of information sciences, a great opportunity and challenge is created for researchers in natural language generation. The present WWW paradigm in which the user is looking for information on the net, trying to interpret it, to determine what is important and useful becomes problematic as the amount of information explodes. A new paradigm needs to be worked out, in which information entities proactively try to capture the attention of the user, in which the information adapts to the user and her particular extra-linguistic context. We are investigating in how far the current state of the art in natural language generation can contribute to that paradigm and how further developments can be targeted towards the generation of context-sensitive meta-text for information sources. This paper presents a research programme including work on different fronts for capturing the user's context, eliciting appropriate linguistic expressions and e...

CogentHelp is a prototype tool for authoring dynamically generated on-line help for applications with graphical user interfaces, embodying the "evolution-friendly" properties of tools in the literate programming tradition. In this paper, we describe CogentHelp, highlighting the usefulness of certain natural language generation techniques in supporting software-engineering goals for help authoring tools -- principally, quality and evolvability of help texts.

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