  Recent advances in corpus-based Natural Language Generation (NLG) hold the
promise of being easily portable across domains, but require costly training
data, consisting of meaning representations (MRs) paired with Natural Language
(NL) utterances. In this work, we propose a novel framework for crowdsourcing
high quality NLG training data, using automatic quality control measures and
evaluating different MRs with which to elicit data. We show that pictorial MRs
result in better NL data being collected than logic-based MRs: utterances
elicited by pictorial MRs are judged as significantly more natural, more
informative, and better phrased, with a significant increase in average quality
ratings (around 0.5 points on a 6-point scale), compared to using the logical
MRs. As the MR becomes more complex, the benefits of pictorial stimuli
increase. The collected data will be released as part of this submission.
