Review of "Natural language generation in artificial intelligence and computational linguistics" by Cécile Paris, William R. Swartout, William C. Mann. Kluwer Academic Publishers 1991.

• Authors: Robert Dale
• Venue: Computational Linguistics
• Year: 1991

A number of collections of papers from the field of natual language generation (NLG) have been published over the last few years: Kempen (1987), Zock and Sabah (1988), Dale, Mellish, and Zock (1990), and now the present volume. All have in common that they are derived in one way or another from workshops on the subject, and should therefore make available new and often exploratory research in a timely fashion. If such a book is to be more than a conference proceedings, it has to do a little more too, of course; it should present the research in more detail than a conference proceedings would, there should be greater cohesion amongst the papers, and it should be produced to an appropriate standard. The present book, like its predecessors, succeeds on some counts but fails on others. The papers in the book are organized into three strands, described in turn below: Text planning, lexical choice, and grammatical resources. The balance between these is rather skewed, however: the first section contains eight papers, and the second and third contain only three papers each.