The Immovable Role of Rules in Natural Language Generation - AnalyticsWeek

By now, the average business user has been deluged with the term Artificial Intelligence so much that he or she likely knows it frequently involves machine learning for enterprise applications of Conversational AI, intelligent search, or Natural Language Generation. With the general population still captivated by the hype around deep learning, neural networks, and predictive models, it's easy to consider rules-based systems for these applications as passé, or perhaps worse, outdated approaches to the suite of natural language technologies. According to Arria NLG CTO Neil Burnett, however, nothing could be further from reality. "Using rules is a better approach than just a [pure] machine learning approach," Burnett revealed. "We still do a good amount of rules-based generation. It's a little more elaborate than you might imagine. It's kind of a rules based approach mixed in with a little bit of ML as well."