This study presents an original and penetrating analysis of the complex
problems surrounding the automatic generation of natural language text.
Laurence Danlos provides a valuable critical review of research in this
important and increasingly active field and goes on to describe a
theoretical model that is thoroughly grounded in linguistic principles.
The model emphasises the semantic, syntactic and lexical constraints
that must be dealt with when establishing a relationship between meaning
and form and it is consideration of such linguistic constraints that
determines Danlos' generation algorithm. The book concludes with a
description of a generation system based on this algorithm which
produces texts in several domains and also a system for the synthesis of
spoken messages from semantic representation. The book is a significant
addition to the literature on text generation and will be of particular
interest to all computational linguists and AI researchers who have
wrestled with the problem of vocabulary selection.