In this chapter and the two following, we turn to details of the components that make up the nlg system architecture we introduced in Chapter 3. Our concern in this chapter is with the component we have called the document planner.

The chapter is organised as follows. In Section 4.1, we give an overview of the task of document planning, including the inputs and outputs of this process; this is largely a recap of material introduced in Chapter 3. In Section 4.2, we look at domain modelling and the related task of message definition: Here we are concerned with the process of deciding how domain information should be represented for the purposes of natural language generation. In Sections 4.3 and 4.4, we turn to the two component tasks implicated in our view of document planning, these being content determination and document structuring. In each case we describe a number of different approaches that can be taken to the tasks. In Section 4.5, we look at how these tasks can be combined architecturally within a document planning module. The chapter ends with some pointers to further reading in Section 4.6.

Introduction

What Document Planning Is About

In the nlg system architecture we presented in Chapter 3, the document planner is responsible for deciding what information to communicate (this being the task of content determination) and determining how this information should be structured for presentation (this being the task of document structuring).