Deriving content selection rules from a corpus of non-naturally occurring documents for a novel NLG application

We describe a methodology for deriving content selection rules for NLG applications that aim to replace oral communications from human experts by written communications that are generated automatically. We argue for greater involvement of users and for a strategy for handling sparse data

Finding common ground: towards a surface realisation shared task

In many areas of NLP reuse of utility tools such as parsers and POS taggers is now common, but this is still rare in NLG. The subfield of surface realisation has perhaps come closest, but at present we still lack a basis on which different surface realisers could be compared, chiefly because of the wide variety of different input representations used by different realisers. This paper outlines an idea for a shared task in surface realisation, where inputs are provided in a common-ground representation formalism which participants map to the types of input required by their system. These inputs are derived from existing annotated corpora developed for language analysis (parsing etc.). Outputs (realisations) are evaluated by automatic comparison against the human-authored text in the corpora as well as by human assessors

Domain transfer for deep natural language generation from abstract meaning representations

Stochastic natural language generation systems that are trained from labelled datasets are often domainspecific in their annotation and in their mapping from semantic input representations to lexical-syntactic outputs. As a result, learnt models fail to generalize across domains, heavily restricting their usability beyond single applications. In this article, we focus on the problem of domain adaptation for natural language generation. We show how linguistic knowledge from a source domain, for which labelled data is available, can be adapted to a target domain by reusing training data across domains. As a key to this, we propose to employ abstract meaning representations as a common semantic representation across domains. We model natural language generation as a long short-term memory recurrent neural network encoderdecoder, in which one recurrent neural network learns a latent representation of a semantic input, and a second recurrent neural network learns to decode it to a sequence of words. We show that the learnt representations can be transferred across domains and can be leveraged effectively to improve training on new unseen domains. Experiments in three different domains and with six datasets demonstrate that the lexical-syntactic constructions learnt in one domain can be transferred to new domains and achieve up to 75-100% of the performance of in-domain training. This is based on objective metrics such as BLEU and semantic error rate and a subjective human rating study. Training a policy from prior knowledge from a different domain is consistently better than pure in-domain training by up to 10%