Aggregation via set partitioning for natural language generation

The role of aggregation in natural language generation is to combine two or more linguistic structures into a single sentence. The task is crucial for generating concise and readable texts. We present an efficient algorithm for automatically learning aggregation rules from a text and its related database. The algorithm treats aggregation as a set partitioning problem and uses a global inference procedure to find an optimal solution. Our experiments show that this approach yields substantial improvements over a clustering-based model which relies exclusively on local information.