Document Planning and MicroPlanning to build NLG Model using SimpleNLG

Question

I am trying to build an NLG Model which would be domain specific. I came across SimpleNLG which I think is a good starting point but looks like it only supports Realisation and not "Document Planning and Micro Planning" as specified in the link below: https://code.google.com/p/simplenlg/wiki/AppendixA

Can anyone point me some links to get started to build an NLG Model, mainly on how to do Document and Micro Planning?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

You may also want to take a look at OpenCCG (http://openccg.sourceforge.net/). Depending on the hand-crafted ontology (that you have to provide) you may be able to specify the structure in terms of that ontology which could serve the purpose of the micro-planning step from the Dale&Reiter's paper.

Answer 2

There is a little bit of support for microplanning in simplenlg - it has a module for simple syntactic aggregation.

As far as I know there are no easily available libraries for document planning and microplanning. The main problem is that the input to NLG systems varies quite a lot and so there is no clear "input". This means that everyone ends up implementing their own data structures and algorithms. You can have a look at some existing NLG systems to see how they implement these thing (here). Perhaps NaturalOWL might be a good candidate if you are working with java.

If you are planning to implement something yourself, have a look at Dale & Reiter 2000 - Building NLG systems. It is a bit dated now but most of the ideas are still relevant. You will find there some example code as well.