Material related to the ESSLLI course "Formal Issues in Natural Language Generation", by Kees van Deemter and Matthew Stone, Aug. 2002.
Caution: work in progress!
I. INTRODUCTION
The literature on Natural Language Generation (NLG) tends to
emphasize application-oriented issues. This course, however,
emphasizes formal aspects of NLG, such as the logical
completeness and computational complexity of generators. Special attention is
given to the component of NLG systems which is responsible for the
generation of referring expressions (GRE). GRE is a well-studied
sub-area of NLG which can be used to expose the main
issues in this area.
II. SLIDES
Here are electronic copies of the transparencies produced for the course. Where they present material from the papers in the syllabus , we have often taken considerable liberties. Each lecture covers a time slot of 90 minutes.
This is the content of the syllabus distributed at ESSLLI. The papers in the syllabus were used as background reading for the lectures.
IV. REFERENCES
The references that follow were mentioned
(or at least hinted at) during the course.
For other references on NLG, see
NLG bibliography. For information about NLG systems, see
NLG systems.
1. NLG Architecture etc.
- E. Reiter and R. Dale (2000). ``Building Natural Language Generation Systems''. Cambridge University Press.
- E. Reiter (1994). Has a consensus NL generation architecture appeared, and is it psycholinguistically plausible? INLG 1994.
- L. Cahill & M. Reape (1999). Component tasks in applied NLG systems. Report ITRI 99-05, University of Brighton, 1999. (Downloadable from http://www.itri.bton.ac.uk/techindex.html)
2. Linguistic Realization (See also Stone at al., in Syllabus):
- C. Brew (1992). Letting the cat out of the bag: Generation for shake-and-bake MT. Coling 1992.
- A. Koller & K. Striegnitz (2002). Generation as dependency parsing. ACL 2002.
- R. Malouf (2000). The order of prenominal adjectives in natural language generation. Procs. of ACL.
- M. Stone and B. Webber (1998). Textual Economy through Close Coupling of Syntax and Semantics. In Procs. of INLG 1998, pages 178-187.
1. NLG in dialogue:
- M. Walker, R. Passonneau & J. Boland (2001). Quantitative and qualitative evaluation of DARPA communicator spoken dialogue systems. ACL 2001.
2. NLG for knowledge editing and multilingual document authoring:
- R. Power, D. Scott & R. Evans (1998). What you see is what you meant: direct knowledge editing with natural language feedback. ECAI 98.
3. Text summarization with NLG:
- M.-Y. Kan & K. R. McKeown (2002). Corpus-based text generation for summarization. INLG 2002.
4. MT with NLG:
- H. Daume, K. Knight, I. Langkilde-Geary, D. Marcu & Kenji Yamada (2002). The importance of lexicalized syntax models for natural language generation tasks. INLG 2002.
- S. Corston-Oliver, M. Gamon, E. Ringger & R. Moore (2002). An overview of Amalgam: A machine-learned generation module. INLG 2002.
1. Reference with pointing
- I. van der Sluis (2001). An empirically motivated algorithm for the generation of multimodal referring expressions. In Procs. of ACL student session. Toulouse.
2. Generating semantically vague descriptions
- K. van Deemter (2000). Generating Vague Descriptions. In Procs. of First International Conf. on Natural Language Generation (INLG-2000), Mitzpe Ramon, Israel.
3. Reference to sets (see also van Deemter 2002, in Syllabus)
- M. Stone (2000). On Identifying Sets. In Procs. of INLG-2000, Mitzpe Ramon.
- K. van Deemter and M. Halldorsson (2001). Logical Form Equivalence: the Case of Referring Expressions Generation. In Procs. of 8th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation (EWNLG-2001), associated with ACL-2001, Toulouse.
- C. Gardent (2002). Generating Minimal Definite Descriptions. In procs. of ACL 2002.
4. The role of relations in referring expressions (also Krahmer and Theune, see Syllabus)
- R. Dale and N. Haddock (1991). Generating Referring Expressions involving Relations. Procs. EACL, Berlin, pp. 161-166.
- H. Horacek (1995). More on Generating Referring Expressions. In Procs. of Fifth European Ws. on NLG. Leiden, The Netherlands.
5. Generating logically redundant referring expressions.
- P. Jordan (2002). Contextual Influences on Attribute Selection for Repeated Descriptions. In K. van Deemter and R. Kibble (Eds.) `Information Sharing: Reference and Presupposition in Language Generation and Interpretation'. CSLI Publications. (pp 295-329)
- I. Paraboni and K. van Deemter (2002).
Generating Easy References: the Case of Document Deixis.
Second International Conference on Natural Language Generation,
New York, July 2002.
6. Category choice in the generation of referring expressions (e.g., choice between pronouns and descriptions)
- K. McCoy and M. Strube (1999) Taking Time to Structure Discourse: Pronoun Generation Beyond Accessibility. In: CogSci '99: Proc. of the 21st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Aug. 19-21, 1999, pp.378-383.
- R. Henschel, H. Cheng, and M. Poesio (2002). Pronominalization revisited. In Procs. of COLING 2000.
7. Frameworks for GRE
- E. Krahmer, S. van Erk, A. Verleg (to appear) Graph-based Generation of Referring Expressions, Computational Linguistics, 29(1), to appear in 2003.
Email:
Kees.van.Deemter@itri.brighton.ac.uk,
mdstone@cs.rutgers.edu
Last updated 27 Aug 2002