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Text Generation

  • Reference work entry
Encyclopedia of Database Systems

Synonyms

Natural language generation (NLG)

Definition

Text generation is a subfield of natural language processing. It leverages knowledge in computational linguistics and artificial intelligence to automatically generate natural language texts, which can satisfy certain communicative requirements.

Historical Background

Research work in the text generation field first appeared in the 1970s. Goldman's work on natural language generation from a deep conceptual base appeared in [2]. In the 1980s, more significant work was contributed in this field: McDonald saw text generation as a decision making problem [6], Appelt on language planning (1981), McKeown [8]. In the 1990s, a generic architecture for text generation was discussed, Reiter [10], Hovy [3]. Still today, variations on the generic architecture is a still a widely discussed question, Mellish et al. [9].

Foundations

Text Generation, or Natural language generation (NLG), is usually compared with another subfield of natural language...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Dale R. Introduction to the special issue on natural language generation. Comput. Linguistics, 24 (3):346–353, 1998.

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  2. Goldman N.M. Computer Generation of Natural Language from a Deep Conceptual Base. Ph.D. thesis, Stanford University, CA, 1974.

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  3. Hovy E.H. 1997, G.B.Varile, A. Zampolli (eds.). Language generation, Chapter 4. In Survey of the State of the Art in Human Language Technology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 139–163.

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  4. Hovy E.H. Natural language generation. Entry for MIT Encyclopedia of Computer Science. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp.585–5881998,

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  5. Hovy E.H. Language generation. Entry for Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, article 86. McMillan, London, 2000.

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  6. McDonald D.D. Natural Language Production as a Process of Decision Making Under Constraint. Ph.D. thesis, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Cambridge, MA, 1980.

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  7. McDonald D.D. 2000, Dale, R. H. Moisl, H. (eds.). Somers 1Natural language generation, Chapter 7. In Handbook of Natural Language Processing, Marcel Dekker, New York, NY, pp. 147–180.

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  8. McKeown K.R. Text Generation: Using Discourse Strategies and Focus Constraints to Generate Natural Language Text. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985.

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  9. Mellish C, et al. A reference architecture for natural language generation systems. Nat. Lang. Eng., 12(1):1–34, 2006.

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  10. Reiter E. Has a consensus NL generation architecture appeared and is it psycholinguistically plausible? In Proc. 7th Int. Conf. on Natural Language Generation, pp. 163–170.1994,

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  11. Reiter E. and Dale R. Building Natural Language Generation Systems. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Peking University, Beijing, China

    Li Zhang

  2. Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China

    Jian-Tao Sun

Authors
  1. Li Zhang
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  2. Jian-Tao Sun
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Zhang, L., Sun, JT. (2009). Text Generation. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_416

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