Natural Language Generation in Interactive Systems

Edited By Amanda Stent , Srinivas Bangalore

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1107010020 ISBN 13: 9781107010024

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2014

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.

Review:

'This book provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in interactive natural language generation, ranging from theoretical foundations over issues of evaluation to practical applications, and written by some of the world's leading researchers in the field. With the widespread use of interactive language technology on the horizon, this book is an immensely helpful resource for industry and academia alike.' Alexander Koller, University of Potsdam, Germany

'Conventional dialog systems in the commercial world invariably produce their linguistic output using simple template-based mechanisms, but the enhanced capabilities of the next wave of intelligent personal assistants and knowledge navigators demand more sophisticated language generation techniques. The broad range of contributions drawn together in this volume provides a ready-made agenda for anyone working in this space, and an excellent head-start on the key issues that need to be considered.' Robert Dale, Chief Technology Officer, Arria NLG

'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

Book Description:

An informative and comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art in natural language generation for interactive systems, this guide serves to introduce graduate students and new researchers to the field of natural language processing and artificial intelligence, with links to corpora, data, software and other resources for pursuing research in this field.