Personality-dependent content selection in natural language generation systems

Abstract

This paper focuses on the computer side of human-computer interaction through natural language, which is the domain of natural language generation (NLG) studies. From a given (usually non-linguistic) input, NLG systems will in principle generate the same fixed text as an output and in order to attain more natural or human-like interaction will often resort to a wide range of strategies for stylistic variation. Among these, the use of computational models of human personality has emerged as a popular alternative in the field and will be the focus of the present work as well. More specifically, the present study describes two machine learning experiments to establish possible relations between personality and content selection (as opposed to the more well-documented relation between personality and surface realisation), and it is, to the best of our knowledge, the first of its kind to address this issue at both macro and micro planning levels, which may arguably pave the way for the future development of more robust personality-dependent systems of this kind.