HYSSOP: Natural Language Generation Meets Knowledge Discovery in Databases

In this paper, we present HYSSOP, a system that generates natural language hypertext summaries of insights resulting from a knowledge discovery process. We discuss the synergy between the two technologies underlying HYSSOP: Natural Language Generation (NLG) and Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD). We first highlight the advantages of natural language hypertext as a summarization medium for KDD results, showing the gains that it provides over charts and tables in terms of conciseness, expressive versatility and ease of interpretation for decision makers. Second, we highlight how KDD technologies, and in particular OLAP and data mining, can implement key tasks of automated natural language data summary generation, in a more domain-independent and scalable way than the human written heuristic rule approach of previous systems.