  Generated output from neural NLG systems often contain errors such as
hallucination, repetition or contradiction. This work focuses on designing a
symbolic intermediate representation to be used in multi-stage neural
generation with the intention of reducing the frequency of failed outputs. We
show that surface realization from this intermediate representation is of high
quality and when the full system is applied to the E2E dataset it outperforms
the winner of the E2E challenge. Furthermore, by breaking out the surface
realization step from typically end-to-end neural systems, we also provide a
framework for non-neural content selection and planning systems to potentially
take advantage of semi-supervised pretraining of neural surface realization
models.
