This article challenges the received wisdom that template-based approaches to the generation of language are necessarily inferior to other approaches as regards their maintainability, linguistic well-foundedness, and quality of output. Some recent NLG systems that call themselves “template-based” will illustrate our claims.

Work on expressive speech synthesis has long focused on the expression of basic emotions. In recent years, however, interest in other expressive styles has been increasing. The research presented in this paper aims at the generation of a storytelling speaking style, which is suitable for storytelling applications and more in general, for applications aimed at children. Based on an analysis of human storytellers' speech, we designed and implemented a set of prosodic rules for converting "neutral" speech, as produced by a text-to-speech system, into storytelling speech. An evaluation of our storytelling speech generation system showed encouraging results.

We present a data-to-speech system called D2S, which can be used for the creation of datato-speech systems in different languages and domains. The most important characteristic of a data-to-speech system is that it combines language and speech generation: language generation is used to produce a natural language text expressing the system's input data, and speech generation is used to make this text audible. In D2S, this combination is exploited by using linguistic information available in the language generation module for the computation of prosody. This allows us to achieve a better prosodic output quality than can be achieved in a plain text-to-speech system. For language generation in D2S, the use of syntactically enriched templates is guided by knowledge of the discourse context, while for speech generation pre-recorded phrases are combined in a prosodically sophisticated manner. This combination of techniques makes it possible to create linguistically sound but efficient systems with a high quality language and speech output.

As in-vehicle information systems are increasingly able to obtain and deliver information, driver distraction becomes a larger concern. In this paper we propose that informative interruption cues (IIC) can be an effective means to support drivers' attention management. As a first step, we investigated the design and presentation modality of IIC that conveyed not only the arrival but also the priority level of a message. Both sound and vibration cues were created for four different priority levels and tested in 5 task conditions that simulated possible perceptional and cognitive load in real driving situations. Results showed that the cues were quickly learned, reliably detected, and quickly and accurately identified. Vibration was found to be a promising alternative for sound to deliver IIC, as vibration cues were identified more accurately and interfered less with driving. Sound cues also had advantages in terms of shorter response time and more (reported) physical comfort.

Abstract. The Virtual Storyteller is a multi-agent framework for automatic story generation. In this paper we describe how plots emerge from the actions of semi-autonomous character agents, focusing on the influence of the characters' emotions on plot development.