I dislike talking about “NLG” vs “templates” because these terms are poorly defined. I prefer to talk about five levels of sophistication in generating texts, which I describe in this post
Simplenlg has evolved over 20 years from a set of Java classes I threw together for a project, into the most widely used open-source NLG package. In this blog I give a quick summary of its history.
Machine Learning and statistical corpus techniques are often very useful in Natural Language Generation, but they are not the best way to solve all NLG problems.
