AGILE Review meeting - April 2000
A reference architecture for NLG
®A general architecture for (multilingual) natural language generation systems:
®
Meaning specification
Text planning
Sentence planning
Lexico-grammatical generation
Content structure
Text plan
Sentence plans
Output text
Strategic
generation
Tactical
generation
The general reference architecture for NLG systems has recently been presented in the literature as an ideal organization of modules (and their interaction) that are needed for the generation of an output text that realizes the content given in the content structure.

Given a content structure, text planning creates a text plan that structures the content as a text – i.e. a sequential presentation. This text plan serves as input to the module for sentence planning. Sentence planning divides the content into “digestable portions” that can be realised as sentences. The output of the sentence planning module is a sequence of sentence plans, whereby each sentence plan specifies how a portion of content should be realised, with reference to the text plan and the flow of discourse specified therein. These sentence plans then serve as input to the lexico-grammatical generators, that generate the actual surface forms (“sentences”).

Text planning together with sentence planning is usually called “strategic generation”, whereas lexico-grammatical generation falls under “tactical generation”.

On the next slide we illustrate how the AGILE system captures this ideal.