The NLG process (Reiter and Dale, 2000) is often viewed as a pipeline consisting of content planning (selecting and structuring the story's content), microplanning (sentence ag-gregation, generation of referring expressions, lexical choice), and surface realization (agreement, verb-subject ordering).
story generation systems typically operate in two phases: (a) creating a plot for the story and (b) transforming it into text (often by means of template-based NLG).