This thesis is on Natural Language Generation. It describes a linguistic realisation
system that translates the semantic information encoded in a conceptual graph into an
English language sentence. The use of a non-hierarchically structured semantic representation (conceptual graphs) and an approximate matching between semantic structures allows us to investigate a more general version of the sentence generation problem
where one is not pre-committed to a choice of the syntactically prominent elements in
the initial semantics. We show clearly how the semantic structure is declaratively related to linguistically motivated syntactic representation — we use D-Tree Grammars
which stem from work on Tree-Adjoining Grammars. The declarative specification of
the mapping between semantics and syntax allows for different processing strategies
to be exploited. A number of generation strategies have been considered: a pure topdown strategy and a chart-based generation technique which allows partially successful
computations to be reused in other branches of the search space. Having a generator
with increased paraphrasing power as a consequence of using non-hierarchical input
and approximate matching raises the issue whether certain 'better' paraphrases can be
generated before others. We investigate preference-based processing in the context of
generation
