Natural language generation (NLG) is a critical component of spoken dialogue and it has a significant impact both on usability and perceived quality. Most NLG systems in common use employ rules and heuristics and tend to generate rigid and stylised responses without the natural variation of human language. They are also not easily scaled to systems covering multiple domains and languages. This paper presents a statistical language generator based on a semantically controlled Long Short-term Memory (LSTM) structure. The LSTM generator can learn from unaligned data by jointly optimising sentence planning and surface realisation using a simple cross entropy training criterion, and language variation can be easily achieved by sampling from output candidates. An objective evaluation in two differing test domains showed improved performance compared to previous methods with fewer heuristics. Human judges scored the LSTM system higher on informativeness and naturalness and overall preferred it to the other systems.

本研究提出了一种基于语义控制LSTM结构的统计自然语言生成器，通过交叉熵训练标准优化句子规划和语言表现，可轻松实现语言变化，并通过两个不同测试域的客观评价和人工评分表明该方法相对于先前方法具有更好的性能和自然度。

用基于条件语义的LSTM自然语言生成技术用于口语对话系统