Generation as a Solution to Its Own Problem
Donia Scott, Richard Power, Roger Evans · 1998
Natural language generation technology is now ripe for commercial exploitation, but one of the remaining bottlenecks is that of providing NLG systems with user-friendly interfaces for specifying the content of documents to be generated. We present here a new technique we have developed for providing such interfaces: WYSIWYM editing. WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Meant) makes novel use of the system's generator to provide a natural language input device which requires no NL interpretation --- only NL generation. 1 Introduction It is generally agreed that the technology of natural language generation has evolved to a stage where it can feasibly be expected to be found in `real world', applied systems. Indeed, within the last year there has been a specialist tutorial (Dale and Reiter, 1997) and a journal article (Reiter and Dale, 1997) aimed at guiding interested parties on how to build such systems; a textbook on this subject is also about to appear (Reiter and Dale, forthcoming). ...