The Third International Conference on Natural Language Generation (INLG 2004) was held from 14th to 16th July 2004 at Careys Manor, Brockenhurst, UK. Supported by the Association for Computational Linguistics Special - terest Group on Generation, the conference continued a twenty-year tradition of biennial international meetings on research into natural language generation. Recent conference venues have included Mitzpe Ramon, Israel (INLG 2000) and New York, USA (INLG 2002). It was our pleasure to invite the thriving and friendly NLG research community to the beautiful New Forest in the south...