Abstract
We present a practical approach to Natural Language Generation (NLG) for spoken dialogue systems. The approach is based on small template fragments (mini-templates). The system’s object architecture facilitates generation of phrases across pre-defined business domains and registers, as well as into different languages. The architecture simplifies NLG in well-understood application contexts, while providing the flexibility for a developer and for the system, to vary linguistic output according to dialogue context, including any intended affective impact. Mini-templates are used with a suite of domain term objects, resulting in an NLG system (MINTGEN – MINi-Template GENerator) whose extensibility and ease of maintenance is enhanced by the sparsity of information devoted to individual domains. The system also avoids the need for specialist linguistic competence on the part of the system maintainer.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Poggi, I., et al.: Greta. A Believable Embodied Conversational Agent. In: Intelligent Information Presentation. Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht (2003)
HUMAINE website, http://emotion-research.net/
Cole, R.A., et al.: Survey of the State of the Art in Human Language Technology. In: Language Generation, Ch. 4, CSLU, Oregon (1995)
Kasper, R.T.: A Flexible Interface for Linking Applications to Penman’s Sentence Generator. In: Proceedings of the DARPA Speech and Natural Language Workshop, Philadelphia (1989)
O’Neill, I.M., et al.: The Queen’s Communicator: An Object-Oriented Dialogue Manager. In: Proceedings of Eurospeech 2003, Geneva, pp. 593–596 (2003)
De Carolis, B., et al.: APML, A Mark-Up Language for Believable Behaviour Generation. In: Proceedings of AAMAS Workshop, Bologna (2002)
Carnie, A.: Flat Structure, Phrasal Variability and Non-Verbal Predication in Irish. In: Celtic Linguistics, Galway (2005)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Cullen, C., O’Neill, I., Hanna, P. (2009). Flexible Natural Language Generation in Multiple Contexts. In: Vetulani, Z., Uszkoreit, H. (eds) Human Language Technology. Challenges of the Information Society. LTC 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5603. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04235-5_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04235-5_13
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-04234-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-04235-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)