Natural Language Generation Software turns data into plain English

Artificial intelligence guru Robert Dale explains the benefits and shortcomings of natural language generation technology and advocates for disclosure of use of the software. Natural language generation, a field in artificial intelligence which automatically turns facts and statistics into coherent English and other languages, offers important advantages for finance and accounting, according to Robert Dale, a longtime expert in the technology. Since 2012, Dale has been CTO and chief strategy scientist at Arria NLG, based in London, and one of the first companies to offer automatic text generation. He is also co-author, with Arria's chief scientist Ehud Reiter, of the textbook, Building Natural Language Generation Systems, first published in 2000 and then again in 2006. In an interview with SearchFinancialApplications, Dale discussed NLG, its benefits for the office of the CFO and the future of artificial intelligence (AI).