# A Survey of Natural Language Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.11739 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11739/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 107 of its 169 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Dec 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 107)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [MS MARCO: A Human Generated MAchine Reading COmprehension Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09268/) (2016)
- [Variational Graph Auto-Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07308/) (2016)
- [Flickr30k Entities: Collecting Region-to-Phrase Correspondences for Richer Image-to-Sentence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04870/) (2015)
- [Don't Give Me the Details, Just the Summary! Topic-Aware Convolutional Neural Networks for Extreme Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08745/) (2018)
- [Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07998/) (2017)
- [Get To The Point: Summarization with Pointer-Generator Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04368/) (2017)
- [BLEURT: Learning Robust Metrics for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04696/) (2020)
- [PEGASUS: Pre-training with Extracted Gap-sentences for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08777/) (2019)
- [A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.03055/) (2015)
- [Teaching Machines to Read and Comprehend](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03340/) (2015)
- [Show and Tell: A Neural Image Caption Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4555/) (2014)
- [RACE: Large-scale ReAding Comprehension Dataset From Examinations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04683/) (2017)
- [Personalizing Dialogue Agents: I have a dog, do you have pets too?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07243/) (2018)
- [Gated Graph Sequence Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05493/) (2015)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [TalkToModel: Explaining Machine Learning Models with Interactive Natural Language Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04154/) (2022)
- [Beyond Statistical Similarity: Rethinking Metrics for Deep Generative Models in Engineering Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02913/) (2023)
- [GPT-Based Models Meet Simulation: How to Efficiently Use Large-Scale Pre-Trained Language Models Across Simulation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13679/) (2023)
- [Correct Like Humans: Progressive Learning Framework for Chinese Text Error Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17447/) (2023)
- [Script-Strategy Aligned Generation: Aligning LLMs with Expert-Crafted Dialogue Scripts and Therapeutic Strategies for Psychotherapy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.06723/) (2024)
- [From Retrieval to Generation: Efficient and Effective Entity Set Expansion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03531/) (2023)
- [From Idea to Implementation: Evaluating the Influence of Large Language Models in Software Development -- An Opinion Paper](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07450/) (2025)
- [Natural Language Generation in Healthcare: A Review of Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04073/) (2025)
- [A Curriculum Learning Approach for Multi-domain Text Classification Using Keyword weight Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15147/) (2022)
- [E2E Refined Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00513/) (2022)
- [LaQual: An Automated Framework for LLM App Quality Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18636/) (2025)
- [Agentic Meta-Orchestrator for Multi-task Copilots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22781/) (2025)
- [Beyond Tokens: A Survey on Decoding Methods for Large Language and Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.14797/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper offers a comprehensive review of the research on Natural Language Generation (NLG) over the past two decades, especially in relation to data-to-text generation and text-to-text generation deep learning methods, as well as new applications of NLG technology. This survey aims to (a) give the latest synthesis of deep learning research on the NLG core tasks, as well as the architectures adopted in the field; (b) detail meticulously and comprehensively various NLG tasks and datasets, and draw attention to the challenges in NLG evaluation, focusing on different evaluation methods and their relationships; (c) highlight some future emphasis and relatively recent research issues that arise due to the increasing synergy between NLG and other artificial intelligence areas, such as computer vision, text and computational creativity.