Natural Language Generation in Interactive Systems

A comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art in natural language generation for interactive systems, with links to resources for further research.

Amanda Stent (Edited by), Srinivas Bangalore (Edited by)

9781107010024, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 12 June 2014

379 pages, 65 b/w illus. 37 tables
25.4 x 18.1 x 2 cm, 0.89 kg

'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

An informative and comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art in natural language generation (NLG) for interactive systems, this guide serves to introduce graduate students and new researchers to the field of natural language processing and artificial intelligence, while inspiring them with ideas for future research. Detailing the techniques and challenges of NLG for interactive applications, it focuses on the research into systems that model collaborativity and uncertainty, are capable of being scaled incrementally, and can engage with the user effectively. A range of real-world case studies is also included. The book and the accompanying website feature a comprehensive bibliography, and refer the reader to corpora, data, software and other resources for pursuing research on natural language generation and interactive systems, including dialog systems, multimodal interfaces and assistive technologies. It is an ideal resource for students and researchers in computational linguistics, natural language processing and related fields.

1. Communicative intentions and natural language generation Nate Blaylock
2. Pursuing and demonstrating understanding in dialogue David DeVault and Matthew Stone
3. Dialogue and compound contributions Matthew Purver, Julian Hough and Eleni Gregoromichelaki
4. Eye tracking for the online evaluation of prosody in speech synthesis Michael White, Rajakrishnan Rajkumar, Kiwako Ito and Shari R. Speer
5. Referability Kees van Deemter
6. Referring expression generation in interaction: a graph-based perspective Emiel Krahmer, Martijn Goudbeek and Mariet Theune
7. Reinforcement learning approaches to natural language generation in interactive systems Oliver Lemony, Srini Janarthanam and Verena Rieser
8. A joint learning approach for situated language generation Nina Dethlefs and Heriberto Cuayáhuitl
9. Data-driven methods for linguistic style control Francois Mairesse
10. Integration of cultural factors into the behavioural models of virtual characters Birgit Endrass and Elisabeth Andre
11. Natural language generation for augmented and assistive technologies Nava Tintarev, Ehud Reiter and Annalu Waller
12. Comparative evaluation and shared tasks for NLG in interactive systems Anja Belz and Helen Hastie.

Subject Areas: Signal processing [UYS], Electronics & communications engineering [TJ], Electrical engineering [THR], Linguistics [CF]