Generating under Global Constraints: the Case of Scripted Dialogue

Recently, the view of Natural Language Generation (nlg) as a Constraint Satisfaction Problem (csp) has seen something of a revival. The aim of this paper is to examine the theoretical issues that arise when nlg is viewed as a csp and to introduce a novel application of constraint-based nlg, i.e., the scripted dialogue. Scripted dialogue shares a number of crucial features with discourse, which make it possible to control the global properties of a computer-generated dialogue in the same way as those of a generated text. We review the dierent approaches to constraint-based generation that have been proposed in the literature and propose a new approach that is specifically suitable for the challenges posed by scripteddialogue generation.