Producing Dialog at MERL: Problems in Generation Engineering

Natural Language Generation in Spoken and Written Dialogue

Volume

Papers from the 2003 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

It is not necessary to have a full-scale NLG system in a dialog system that uses fixed-text templates for its responses to significantly improve in their cohesion and fluency. Given a flexible system, fixed phrases can be transparently replaced with pronouns or definite references. We describe how our DiamondTalk architecture lets us interpose our subsequent reference facility, Potemkin, between the synthesizer component and the Collagen collaborative dialog system where the texts originate.