Generating More Natural Route Descriptions

Abstract

In this paper we tackle the problem of generating natural route descriptions on the basis of input obtained from a commercially available wayfinding system. We adopt a standard pipelined natural language generation architecture, and focus in particular on the role of the generation subtasks of aggregation and referring expression generation in producing fluent output. Through examples we demonstrate that it is possible to bridge the gap between underlying representation and natural sounding descriptions. Further work along these lines will contribute both to the area of natural language generation and to the improvement of wayfinding system interfaces.