The natural language generation component of most dialogue systems is based on templates. Template-based generators are hard to maintain and reuse, and the sentences they produce lack the variability and robustness needed by conversational systems. In this paper, a flexible and domain-independent natural language generator for spoken dialogue systems is proposed which combines fixed surface expressions with freely generated text. The generation algorithm follows a hybrid approach, combining finite state machine (FSM) grammars and corpus-based language models. In this approach, the FSM grammar (a reversible parser grammar) is constrained by a word and concept n-gram that takes terminals and non-terminal co-occurrences into account. The n-gram grammar helps prevent inappropriate derivations, therefore improving the quality of the generated texts. The proposed algorithm achieves faster than real-time performance because of the limited number of derivations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The natural language generation component of most dialogue systems is based on templates. Template-based generators are hard to maintain and reuse, and the sentences they produce lack the variability and robustness needed by conversational systems. In this paper, a flexible and domain-independent natural language generator for spoken dialogue systems is proposed which combines fixed surface […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","footnotes":""},"msr-content-type":[3],"msr-research-highlight":[],"research-area":[13561],"msr-publication-type":[193716],"msr-product-type":[],"msr-focus-area":[],"msr-platform":[],"msr-download-source":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-post-option":[],"msr-field-of-study":[],"msr-conference":[],"msr-journal":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-161515","msr-research-item","type-msr-research-item","status-publish","hentry","msr-research-area-algorithms","msr-locale-en_us"],"msr_publishername":"","msr_edition":"Proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology 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