Evolution of Natural Language Generation

Since the dawn of Sci-Fi cinema, society has been fascinated with Artificial Intelligence. Whenever we hear the term "AI", our first thought is typically one of a futuristic robot from movies such as Terminator, The Matrix and I, Robot. Although we might still be a few years away from robots that can think for themselves, there have been significant developments in the fields of machine learning and natural language understanding over the past few years. Applications such as Personal Assistants (Siri/Alexa), chatbots and Question-Answering bots are truly revolutionizing the way we interface with machines and go about our daily lives. Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) are among the fastest growing applications of AI due to the increasing need to understand and derive meaning from language, with its numerous ambiguities and varied structure. According to Gartner, "By 2019, natural-language generation will be a standard feature of 90 percent of modern BI and Analytics platforms".