Syntactic Generation

In a natural language generation module, we often distinguish two components. On the one hand it needs to be decided what should be said. This task is delegated to a planning component. Such a component might produce an expression representing the content of the proposed utterance. On the basis of this representation the syntactic generation component produces the actual output sentence(s). Although the distinction between planning and syntactic generation is not uncontroversial, we will nonetheless assume such an architecture here, in order to explain some of the issues that arise in syntactic generation.