  One of the most important questions in applied NLG is what benefits (or
`value-added', in business-speak) NLG technology offers over template-based
approaches. Despite the importance of this question to the applied NLG
community, however, it has not been discussed much in the research NLG
community, which I think is a pity. In this paper, I try to summarize the
issues involved and recap current thinking on this topic. My goal is not to
answer this question (I don't think we know enough to be able to do so), but
rather to increase the visibility of this issue in the research community, in
the hope of getting some input and ideas on this very important question. I
conclude with a list of specific research areas I would like to see more work
in, because I think they would increase the `value-added' of NLG over
templates.
