UPDATE: online book launch at 3PM (UK) on 16 Dec (EventBrite)

My new book Natural Language Generation has just been published. It takes a similar approach to my blog in many ways (indeed blog readers will find content from my blogs in the book). Its a book about NLG in the broad sense, including requirements, evaluation, and use cases, as well as technology; its not a book about how machine learning can be used for NLG (although this is of course discussed). There are plenty of other sources for info about the latest technology, I wanted to provide background about some of the óther things that NLG researchers and developers should be familiar with.

In other words, an expert on language models wont learn much about LLMs from my book, but hopefully they will learn something about rule-based approaches, what NLG users are looking for, evaluation (human and metric), etc.

One of my goals was to write a book which would still be useful in 2030 (maybe even 2035), which means focusing on concepts and fundamentals, not on the latest technologies, applications, evaluation techniques, etc. I found that people were still using the NLG book that Robert Dale and I wrote in 2000 many years after it was published because the conceptual material was still valid, I’ve tried to apply this lesson to my new book.

The book is also personal, I add personal notes and otherwise base it on my experiences. I’ve been working on NLG since the late 1980s, and I’ve tried to draw on my experiences and “war stories” over the years and decades.

For more information, see the book section of this site; the preface describes the goals in more detail.

The book is expensive, 40 pounds or more (exact price depends on what format you buy and who you buy it from). I plan to release the submitted manuscript (without copyediting and other improvements made by the publisher) on Arxiv in early 2025.

If you read the book and like it, please let other people know, and indeed consider writing a review if appropriate. I may have a “book signing” event in early 2025, to-be-decided.

Supporting site

I would like to use the book section of ehudreiter.com to provide supporting material, especially links to resources such as talks, surveys, code repositories, etc. Plus errata as needed. I hope to keep this more or less up to date (of course the book itself will not change), and indeed sope that the supporting site will become a useful resource in its own right.

If you have any suggestions for content to add (or comments on what you would like to see), please let me know!