Investigating Content Selection for Language Generation using Machine Learning

The content selection component of a natural language generation system decides which information should be communicated in its output. We use information from reports on the game of cricket. We first describe a simple factoid-to-text alignment algorithm then treat content selection as a collective classification problem and demonstrate that simple 'grouping' of statistics at various levels of granularity yields substantially improved results over a probabilistic baseline. We additionally show that holding back of specific types of input data, and linking database structures with commonality further increase performance.