This book is a selection of papers presented at the Fourth International Workshop on Natural Language Generation, held in Catalina, California in July of 1988. If there is a central theme to this compilation of articles, it is that natural language generators are no longer relatively straightforward, mechanistic translators which produce text from an internal representation language. Rather, state-of-the-art theories of generation look very much like theories of planning. Many analogies can be made between the generation process and hierarchical planning. The first level of planning in most systems corresponds to the selection of an overall discourse structure. As planning continues, lexical selection is analogous to the task of operator selection. Each lexical choice imposes constraints on the rest of the "plan" which restrict further choices.
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