Search Challenges in Natural Language Generation with Complex Optimization Objectives

Automatic natural language generation (NLG) is a difficult problem already when merely trying to come up with natural-sounding utterances. Ubiquituous applications, in particular companion technologies, pose the additional challenge of flexible adaptation to a user or a situation. This requires optimizing complex objectives such as information density, in combinatorial search spaces described using declarative input languages. We believe that AI search and planning is a natural match for these problems, and could substantially contribute to solving them effectively. We illustrate this using a concrete example NLG framework, give a summary of the relevant optimization objectives, and provide an initial list of research challenges.