Design of a knowledge-based report generator

Abstract

Knowledge-Based Report Generation is a technique for automatically generating natural language reports from computer databases. It is so named because it applies knowledge-based expert systems software to the problem of text generation. The first application of the technique, a system for generating natural language stock reports from a daily stock quotes database, is partially implemented. Three fundamental principles of the technique are its use of domain-specific semantic and linguistic knowledge, its use of macro-level semantic and linguistic constructs (such as whole messages, a phrasal lexicon, and a sentence-combining grammar), and its production system approach to knowledge representation.