Prose description of game engine, using Reiter and Dale book

[audiodude]

I have been intending to participate in NaNoGenMo 2017 since the beginning of the month. I am currently reading "Building Natural Language Generation Systems" by Reiter and Dale (2000). It has been pretty helpful, though somewhat dry (it is a textbook).

I realized early on that my language generation systems would need some kind of model/data to report on. If I were to make a model of a novel's story, with characters, objects and locations, I realized this looks a bit like a game engine.

The current problem I'm having is that the Reiter and Dale book expects you to use an off-the-shelf system for surface text realization. However, it looks like KPML is the only extant system that they discuss, and it requires some commercial version of a LISP interpreter and/or only runs on Windows, I'm not quite sure.

So currently I have a simple engine which generates a Document Plan, but I don't have a way of converting that to Phrase Specifications yet. But even if I had a way to generate Phrase Specifications, I would have no way to realize them into actual sentences. So I feel like I may be screwed.

[audiodude]

My repo is here: https://github.com/audiodude/nanogenmo2017-2