How important is the pipeline architecture in RAGS?
A lot less important than we originally thought when we started from Reiter’s model. It is now clear to us that, as well as the fact that there are well-known problems with pipelines in general, people are unlikely to agree easily on what exactly a pipeline should be. We regard our pipeline proposal as simply one of a whole set of possibilities for how to schedule the operations carried out in an NLG system. Our proposal basically stipulates two stages in the generation process and what information needs to be present at those stages. This forces most operations to occur in a fixed position (relative to these stages). We hope, however, that people building modules carrying out RAGS-compliant operations will experiment with many more interesting ways of combining them together.
