Constraint-based Natural Language Generation: A Survey

This paper contains a survey of 25 papers that deal with constraint-based approaches to Natural Language Generation (nlg). Amongst other things, we discuss the nature of the constraints that have been modelled in nlg (stylistic, syntactic, etc.), their type (hard versus soft), the units to which the constraints are applied (words, sentences, rhetorical structure, etc.) and the approaches to solving constraint satisfaction problems in nlg. The survey starts with a brief introduction to the constraint-based view of nlg and a section that aims to clarify the many-faceted notion of a constraint. The aim of this survey is to provide the reader with an overview of constraint-based approaches to nlg; it does not present an exhaustive list of all the literature in this area. What it does aim for, is to give a reasonably representative sample of the various approaches to constraint-based nlg.

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