Natural Language Generation Using Sequential Models: A Survey

Natural Language Generation (NLG) is one of the most critical yet challenging tasks in all Natural Language Processing applications. It is a process to automate text generation so that humans can understand its meaning. A handful of research articles published in the literature have described how NLG can produce understandable texts in various languages. The use of sequence-to-sequence modeling powered by deep learning techniques such as Long Term Short Term Memory, Recurrent Neural Networks, and Gated Recurrent Units has received much popularity as text generators. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of text generations and their related techniques, such as statistical, traditional, and neural network-based techniques. Generating text using the sequence-to-sequence model is not a simple task as it needs to handle continuous data, such as images, and discrete information, such as text. Therefore, in this study, we have identified some crucial areas for further research on text generation, such as incorporating a large text dataset, identifying and resolving grammatical errors, and generating extensive sentences or paragraphs. This work has also presented a detailed overview of the activation functions used in deep learning-based models and the evaluation metrics used for text generation.