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 of England for INLG 2004. INLG is the leading international conference in the field of natural language generation. It provides a forum for the presentation and discussion of original research on all aspects of the generation of language, including psychological modelling of human language production as well as computational approaches to the automatic generation of language. This volume includes apaper by the keynote speaker, Ardi Roelofs of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholingu- tics and the F. C. Donders Centre for CognitiveNeuroimaging,18 regular papers reportingthelatestresearch results and directions, and 4 student papers descr- ing doctoral work in progress. These papers reveal a particular concentration of current research effort on statistical and machine learning methods, on referring expressions, and on variation in surface realisation. The papers were selected from 46 submissions from all over the world (27 from Europe, 13 from North America, 6 from elsewhere), which were subjected to a rigorous double-blind reviewing process undertaken by our hard-working programme committee.