Natural Language Generation in Interactive Systems

‘This book provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in interactive natural language generation, ranging from theoretical foundations over issues of evaluation to practical applications, and written by some of the world’s leading researchers in the field. With the widespread use of interactive language technology on the horizon, this book is an immensely helpful resource for industry and academia alike.’ Alexander Koller, University of Potsdam, Germany‘Conventional dialog systems in the commercial world invariably produce their linguistic output using simple template-based mechanisms, but the enhanced capabilities of the next wave of intelligent personal assistants and knowledge navigators demand more sophisticated language generation techniques. The broad range of contributions drawn together in this volume provides a ready-made agenda for anyone working in this space, and an excellent head-start on the key issues that need to be considered.’ Robert Dale, Chief Technology Officer, Arria NLG‘This book provides a timely contribution that brings together two areas, Natural Language Generation and Conversational Interfaces, that don’t interact as frequently as one would expect. The breadth of the contributions is remarkable … I wholeheartedly recommend this book not only to practitioners in each of the two areas, but to anybody who is interested in Human Computer Interaction and Natural Language Processing.’ Barbara Di Eugenio, University of Illinois, Chicago

Amanda Stent is a researcher at AT&T Labs – Research. Her areas of interest are at the intersection of dialog systems and natural language generation and include coreference, sentence planning, alignment in dialog, and applications of NLG to topics ranging from computer security to assistive technology. Dr Stent has authored over 70 research publications and holds several patents.

Srinivas Bangalore has been at AT&T Labs – Research since 1997 and has worked on many areas of natural language processing including spoken language translation, multimodal understanding, language generation and question-answering. He has co-edited a book, Supertagging, authored over 100 research publications, and holds 45 patents in these areas. He has been awarded the AT&T Outstanding Mentor Award and the AT&T Science and Technology Medal.