Dietmar F. Rösner

Customizing RST for the Automatic Production of Technical Manuals

Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) has emerged as a promising candidate for text representation in NLG. We investigated the applicability of RST in the automatic production of multilingual technical manuals. Starting from a domain knowledge base, we construct an RST-tree for a particular manual section, which is then converted to a set of sentence plans. These plans serve as input to sentence generators that produce the final text. In this paper, we report first on a number of open questions regarding general aspects of RST. Arguing that the original set of RST relations is not specific enough for practical generation purposes, we suggest a number of new relations that we found useful in our domain. After briefly examining the stage of RST tree construction, we then outline a procedure for converting RST trees to a sequence of sentence plans.

Generating multilingual documents from a knowledge base: the TECHDOC project

TECHDOC is an implemented system demonstrating the feasibility of generating multilingual technical documents on the basis of a language-independent knowledge base. Its application domain is user and maintenance instructions, which are produced from underlying plan structures representing the activities, the participating objects with their properties, relations, and so on. This paper gives a brief outline of the system architecture and discusses some recent developments in the project: the addition of actual event simulation in the KB, steps towards a document authoring tool, and a multimodal user interface.

TECHDOC: A System for the Automatic Production of Multilingual Technical Documents

The availability of technical documents in multiple languages is a problem of increasing significance, particularly in Europe. We propose to exploit natural language generation technology to help overcome the documentation problem. We focused on multilingual automobile manuals, specifically maintenance instructions, and analyzed them in terms of underlying technical knowledge and text structure. These investigations led us to a design of a system for the automatic, multilingual generation of such maintenance manuals. TECHDOC uses a domain knowledge base to first construct a language-independent text representation, which is then transformed into a collection of individual sentence plans. These are given to language-specific sentence generators to produce the desired text.

An XML-based document suite

We report about the current state of development of a document suite and its applications. This collection of tools for the flexible and robust processing of documents in German is based on the use of XML as unifying formalism for encoding input and output data as well as process information. It is organized in modules with limited responsibilities that can easily be combined into pipelines to solve complex tasks. Strong emphasis is laid on a number of techniques to deal with lexical and conceptual gaps that are typical when starting a new application.