--- title: "Current Research in Natural Language Generation (1991)" description: "This item is not an original study. 4 references, cited by 13 papers here. Among them: 0." authors: ["Ingrid Zukerman"] year: 1991 venue: "Computational Linguistics" source: "https://aclanthology.org/J91-3007/" licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)" licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/" summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License" canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/zukerman-1991-current-research-natural-language-generation/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/zukerman-1991-current-research-natural-language-generation/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [1991](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/1991/) / Current Research in Natural Language Generation # Current Research in Natural Language Generation **Authors:** [Ingrid Zukerman](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/ingrid-zukerman/) · **Year:** 1991 · **Venue:** [Computational Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/cl/) ([Computational Linguistics 1991](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/cl/1991/)) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) **Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/J91-3007/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/J91-3007.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W3087843244) **Citations:** 0 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [13](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/zukerman-1991-current-research-natural-language-generation/cited-by/) in our library, of the 149,439 papers whose bibliographies we read ## Summary This item is not an original study. It is Ingrid Zukerman's review of an edited volume, *Current Research in Natural Language Generation* (Robert Dale, Chris Mellish, Michael Zock, eds., Academic Press, 1990). The book gathers revised versions of papers presented at the second European workshop on natural language generation, held in Edinburgh in April 1989, and surveys NLG work of that period, with a European focus. Zukerman reviews eleven chapters grouped into four parts: text planning, linguistic realization, building descriptions, and connectionist approaches. For each chapter she outlines the core idea and notes weaknesses, mostly in presentation: inconsistent notation, missing worked examples, unimplemented heuristics, or absent implementation statistics. Her overall verdict is positive. She judges the chapters substantial and finds the mix of position papers, full-system descriptions and component studies well balanced. She notes two gaps: no nontechnical domains such as story generation, and no coverage of Systemic Grammars. She also sees a consensus forming around schemas and RST for content planning and unification-based grammars for realization. The review is useful as a map of early NLG research. ## Key points - The volume has 356 pages and four sections: 4 text-planning papers, 2 realization papers, 3 description papers and 2 connectionist papers. - **Text planning:** - Hovy lists seven open problems in paragraph planning from an RST perspective. - Scott & de Souza propose psycholinguistically motivated heuristics for realizing RST relations. - Cawsey describes an interactive explanatory planner that adapts to the user. - McKeown et al. present COMET, which uses FUF for its media coordinator, lexical interface and grammatical realization. - **Realization:** - van Noord analyzes head-driven bottom-up generation. - De Smedt's IPF builds on Segment Grammars and accepts conceptual input in arbitrary order. - **Descriptions:** - Horacek describes a generator embedded in an advisory dialogue system. - Dale's Epicure produces recipes and refers to entities that change over time. - Reiter gives an algorithm for user-tailored object descriptions, with a complexity analysis. - **Connectionist:** - Houghton models phoneme sequence recall through competitive queuing. - Kitano builds simultaneous English–Japanese interpretation by combining marker-passing with a connectionist network. *Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.* 📚 Shelves (4): [🖥️ Computer Science](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/computer-science/) · 18,614 works · [🤖 Artificial Intelligence](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/computer-science/artificial-intelligence/) · 17,965 works · [🎭 Arts and Humanities](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/) · 17,450 works · [🗣️ Language and Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/language-and-linguistics/) · 17,296 works 🧭 Topics (1): [✍️ Text generation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/text-generation/) · 214 works ## Cite Cite as: Ingrid Zukerman. 1991. Current Research in Natural Language Generation. Computational Linguistics. The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @article{zukerman1991current, title = {{Current Research in Natural Language Generation}}, author = {Ingrid Zukerman}, journal = {Computational Linguistics}, year = {1991}, url = {https://aclanthology.org/J91-3007/} } ``` - [← previous Exploiting Conversational Implicature for Generating Concise Explanations](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/horacek-1991-exploiting-conversational-implicature-generating-concise/) - [next → The Acquisition and Application of Context Sensitive Grammar for English](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/simmons-1991-acquisition-application-context-sensitive-grammar/) - [↑ back to papers of 1991](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/1991/) ## References 4 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. Kempen, Gerard (1987). "A framework for incremental syntactic tree formation." Proceedings, lOth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-87), Milan, Italy, 655-660. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Kempen%2C+Gerard+%281987%29%2E+%22A+framework+for+incremental+syntactic+tree+formation%2E%22+Proceedings%2C+lOth+International+Joint+Conference+on+Artificial+Intelligence+%28IJCAI%2D87%29%2C+Milan%2C+Italy%2C+655%2D660%2E) 2. Litman, Diane Judith (1985). Plan recognition and discourse analysis: an integrated approach for understanding dialogues. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Litman%2C+Diane+Judith+%281985%29%2E+Plan+recognition+and+discourse+analysis%3A+an+integrated+approach+for+understanding+dialogues%2E) 3. Ingrid Zukerman is a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at Monash University, conducting research in discourse planning and user modeling. She received her B.Sc. in industrial engineering and management and her M.Sc. in operations research, both from the Technion--Israel Institute of Technology. In… [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Ingrid+Zukerman+is+a+Senior+Lecturer+in+Computer+Science+at+Monash+University%2C+conducting+research+in+discourse+planning+and+user+modeling%2E+She+received+her+B%2ESc%2E+in+industrial+engineering+and+managem) 4. Mann, William C.; and Thompson, Sandra (1988). "[Rhetorical Structure Theory: toward a functional theory of text organization](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/mann-1988-rhetorical-structure-theory-functional/)." Text, 8(3), 243-281. *Updated 30 October 2026*