Natural Language Generation (NLG) - TechTarget

NLG vs. NLU vs. NLP

NLP is an umbrella term that refers to the use of computers to understand human language in both written and verbal forms. NLP is built on a framework of rules and components, and it converts unstructured data into a structured data format.

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Diagram showing the relationship between natural language processing, natural language understanding and natural language generation
Natural language processing encompasses natural language understanding and natural language generation, two related processes.

NLP encompasses both NLG and NLU, which have the following distinct, but related capabilities:

  • NLU refers to the ability of a computer to use syntactic and semantic analysis to determine the meaning of text or speech.
  • NLG enables computing devices to generate text and speech from data input.

Chatbots and "suggested text" features in email clients, such as Gmail's Smart Compose, are examples of applications that use both NLU and NLG. Natural language understanding lets a computer understand the meaning of the user's input, and natural language generation provides the text or speech response in a way the user can understand.

NLG is connected to both NLU and information retrieval. It is also related to text summarization, speech generation and machine translation. Much of the basic research in NLG also overlaps with computational linguistics and the areas concerned with human-to-machine and machine-to-human interaction.

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