Natural Language Generation in the context of the Semantic Web

Natural Language Generation (NLG) is concerned with transforming some formal content input into a natural language output, given some communicative goal. Although this input has taken many forms and representations over the years, it is the semantic/conceptual representations that have always been considered as the ``natural'' starting ground for NLG. Therefore, it is natural that the Semantic Web (SW), with its machine-processable representation of information with explicitly defined semantics, has attracted the interest of NLG practitioners from early on. We attempt to provide an overview of the main paradigms of NLG from SW data, emphasizing how the Semantic Web provides opportunities for the NLG community to improve their state-of-the-art approaches whilst bringing about challenges that need to be addressed before we can speak of a real symbiosis between NLG and the Semantic Web.