Applied artificial intelligence technology for runtime computation of story outlines to support natural language generation (NLG)

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology can be used in combination with composable communication goal statements and an ontology to facilitate a user's ability to quickly structure story outlines in a manner usable by an NLG narrative generation system without any need for the user to directly author computer code. This AI technology permits NLG systems to determine the appropriate content for inclusion in a narrative story about a data set in a manner that will satisfy a desired communication goal. The determined content can be arranged in a computed story outline that is created at runtime, and NLG can be performed on the computed story outline to generate the narrative story.