The Purpose of This Book

This book describes natural language generation (nlg), which is a subfield of artificial intelligence and computational linguistics that is concerned with building computer software systems that can produce meaningful texts in English or other human languages from some underlying nonlinguistic representation of information. nlg systems use knowledge about language and the application domain to automatically produce documents, reports, help messages, and other kinds of texts.

As we enter the new millennium, work in natural language processing, and in particular natural language generation, is at an exciting stage in its development. The mid- to late 1990s have seen the emergence of the first fielded nlg applications, and the first software houses specialising in the development of nlg technology. At the time of writing, only a handful of systems are in everyday use, but many more are under development and should be fielded within the next few years. The growing interest in applications of the technology has also changed the nature of academic research in the field. More attention is now being paid to software engineering issues, and to using nlg within a wider document generation process that incorporates graphical elements and other realities of the Web-based information age such as hypertext links.

However, despite the growing interest in nlg in general and applied nlg in particular, it is often difficult for people who are not already knowledgeable in the field to obtain a comprehensive overview of what is involved in building a natural language generation system.