Natural language generation systems (NLG) map non-linguistic representations
into strings of words through a number of steps using intermediate
representations of various levels of abstraction. Template based systems, by
contrast, tend to use only one representation level, i.e. fixed strings, which
are combined, possibly in a sophisticated way, to generate the final text.
In some circumstances, it may be profitable to combine NLG and template based
techniques. The issue of combining generation techniques can be seen in more
abstract terms as the issue of mixing levels of representation of different
degrees of linguistic abstraction. This paper aims at defining a reference
architecture for systems using mixed representations. We argue that mixed
representations can be used without abandoning a linguistically grounded
approach to language generation.Comment: 6 page