  The main aim of this paper is to introduce automated generation of scripted
dialogue as a worthwhile topic of investigation. In particular the fact that
scripted dialogue involves two layers of communication, i.e., uni-directional
communication between the author and the audience of a scripted dialogue and
bi-directional pretended communication between the characters featuring in the
dialogue, is argued to raise some interesting issues. Our hope is that the
combined study of the two layers will forge links between research in text
generation and dialogue processing. The paper presents a first attempt at
creating such links by studying three types of strategies for the automated
generation of scripted dialogue. The strategies are derived from examples of
human-authored and naturally occurring dialogue.
