Implementation architectures for natural language generation

Generic software architectures aim to support re-use of components, focusing of research and development effort, and evaluation and comparison of approaches. In the field of natural language processing, generic frameworks for understanding have been successfully deployed to meet all of these aims, but nothing comparable yet exists for generation. The nature of the task itself, and the current methodologies available to research it, seem to make it more difficult to reach the necessary level of consensus to support generic proposals. Recent work has made progress towards establishing a generic framework for generation at the functional level, but left open the issue of actual implementation. In this paper, we discuss the requirements for such an implementation layer for generation systems, drawing on two initial attempts to implement it. We argue that it is possible and useful to distinguish “functional architecture” from “implementation architecture” for generation systems.