The Narrator: NLG for digital storytelling

We present the Narrator, an NLG component used for the generation of narratives in a digital storytelling system. We describe how the Narrator works and show some examples of generated stories

Using WYSIWYM to Create an Open-ended Interface for the Semantic Grid

Publisher PD

e-Social Science and Evidence-Based Policy Assessment : Challenges and Solutions

Peer reviewedPreprin

Using natural language generation to provide access to semantic metadata

In recent years, the use of using metadata to describe and share resources has grown in importance, especially in the context of the Semantic Web.  However, access to metadata is difficult for users without experience with description logic or formal languages, and currently this description applies to most web users.  There is a strong need for interfaces that provide easy access to semantic metadata, enabling novice users to browse, query and create it easily. This thesis describes a natural language generation interface to semantic metadata called LIBER (Language Interface for Browsing and Editing Rdf), driven by domain ontologies which are integrated with domain-specific linguistic information.  LIBER uses the linguistic information to generate fluent descriptions and search terms through syntactic aggregation. The tool contains three modules to support metadata creation, querying and browsing, which implement the WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Meant) natural language generation approach.  Users can add and remove information by editing system-generated feedback texts.  Two studies have been conducted to evaluate LIBER’s usability, and compare it to a different Semantic Web interface.  The studies showed subjects with no prior experience of the Semantic Web could use LIBER effectively to create, search and browse metadata, and were a useful source of ideas in which to improve LIBER’s usability.  However, the results of these studies were less positive than we had hoped, and users actually preferred the other Semantic Web tool.  This has raised questions about which user audience LIBER should aim for, and the extent to which the underlying ontologies influence the usability of the interface. LIBER’s portability to other domains is supported by a tool with which ontology developers without a background in linguistics can prepare their ontologies for use in LIBER by adding the necessary linguistic information.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Evaluating an Ontology-Driven WYSIWYM Interface

This paper describes an evaluation study of an ontology-driven WYSIWYM interface for metadata creation. Although the results are encouraging, they are not as positive as those of a similar tool developed for the medical domain. We believe this may be due, not to the WYSIWYM interface, but to the complexity of the underlying ontologies and the fact that subjects were unfamiliar with them. We discuss the ways in which ontology development might be influenced by issues stemming from using an NLG approach for user access to data, and the effect these factors have on general usability.

Generating ellipsis using discourse structures,” in Proc. ESSLLI Workshop Cross-Modular Approaches to Ellipsis

This article describes an effort to generate elliptic sentences, using Dependency Trees connected by Discourse Relations as input. We contend that the process of syntactic aggregation should be performed in the Surface Realization stage of the language generation process, and that Dependency Trees with Rhetorical Relations are excellent input for a generation system that has to generate ellipsis. We also propose a taxonomy of the most common Dutch cue words, grouped according to the kind of discourse relations they signal.