@inproceedings{sivaprasad-etal-2026-rag,
    title = "{RAG} as a collapsed {NLG} pipeline",
    author = "Sivaprasad, Adarsa  and
      Sundararajan, Barkavi  and
      Howcroft, David M.",
    editor = "Mahamood, Saad  and
      Howcroft, David M.  and
      van Deemter, Kees  and
      Balloccu, Simone  and
      Sivaprasad, Adarsa  and
      Sundararajan, Barkavi  and
      Bugar{\'i}n Diz, Alberto  and
      Alonso-Moral, Jose Mar{\'i}a",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 1st Symposium on Natural Language Generation Evaluations",
    month = jun,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Aberdeen, United Kingdom",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-retroeval/2026.retroeval-main.5/",
    pages = "33--38",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-436-1",
    abstract = "The NLG pipeline of Reiter and Dale has long served as the foundational framework for data-to-text system design and evaluation. However its relationship to modern generative architec- tures remains underexplored. In this conceptual analysis, we argue that Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) constitutes a collapsed and partially reconstructed instantiation of the classical NLG pipeline, using it to identify failure modes of RAG around context faithfulness and retrieval non-determinism."
}