This chapter presents some example NLG systems, summarises the content of the rest of the book, and also gives a short history of NLG. The chapter includes the following sections:

• What is Natural Language Generation
• Example: Weather forecast (data-to-text)
• Example: Summarising consultations (text-to-text)
• Technologies
• Effectiveness
• Use cases and applications
• Ethics
• A very short history of NLG
• Resources and further reading

Resources: Selected Blogs

• INLG: What real-world NLG users want
• NLG=Task+Data+Model/Alg+Eval
• The latest/trendiest tech isnt always appropriate
• Vision: NLG Can Help Humanise Data and AI

Resources: Talks

• History of NLG (Ehud) (Youtube video)
• NLG Introduction (Ehud) (PDF)

Resources: Websites and Links

• ACL Anthology
• SIGGEN (ACL Special Interest Group on NLG)

Resources: Surveys and Books

• Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023
• Survey of the State of the Art in Natural Language Generation: Core tasks, applications and evaluation (2018)