1996 SALS-SIG Seminars

SALS-SIG Research Seminar

Computer Assistance for Multilingual Authoring

Cecile Paris
Division of Information Technology, CSIRO Sydney

When: Friday, 6th December 1996

Time: 10:00am

Where: Room E6A357, Macquarie University

Abstract:

Typical natural language generation systems aim at completely automating the production of text. They can, however, also be used to assist technical authors in their work. It is on this facet of generation technology that we will focus in this talk. In particular, we will present DRAFTER, a generation system designed to support technical authors in their task of producing multiligual documentation for software systems. DRAFTER is an interactive support tool intended to be integrated in the technical author's working environment. To this end, it was designed based on a user requirements analysis. DRAFTER tries to automate some of the more tedious aspects of the authors' tasks and support them in writing multilingual documentation (French and English). As with any generation system, DRAFTER requires a semantic knowledge base from which text can be generated. While DRAFTER obtains as much as it can of this knowledge base automatically from external sources, it also allows the authors to specify the portions that cannot be acquired automatically, and provides for a parallel development of knowledge base and natural language text.

Enquiries: sals@mri.mq.edu.au