Keith Vander Linden

Expressing procedural relationships in multilingual instructions

In this paper we discuss a study of the expression of procedural relations in multilingual user instructions, in particular the relations of Generation and Enablement. These procedural relations are defined in terms of a plan representation model, and applied in a corpus study of English, French, and Portuguese instructions. The results of our analysis indicate specific guidelines for the tactical realisation of expressions of these relations in multilingual instructional text.

Using System Networks to Build Rhetorical Structures

We are currently engaged in a project to study the generation of instructional texts for common consumer devices. Our initial efforts have focused on an exhaustive corpus-based analysis of instruction booklets for cordless telephones. In this paper, we present our analysis of the way the various processes used in this domain are expressed. Our emphasis here is on the relationship between the surface grammatical coding of these processes and the underlying rhetorical structure of the text. This analysis has been formalized using a systemic-functional framework, with the resulting system networks forming the basis for the Imagene text generation system.

Generating UML diagrams from task models

The importance of task analysis and modelling to software system development is well recognised. After all, the central mission for most software systems is to help users accomplish their tasks. However, while object-oriented analysis and design (OOAD) has been established as the major paradigm in the software industry, effectively incorporating task analysis and modelling into that process is still in the realm of research. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for integrating OOAD and Task Modelling. By exploiting the common semantic ground between task models and system behaviour models, we describe how UML diagrams, such as use cases, use case diagrams and scenario diagrams, can be automatically generated from task models represented in a semi-formal notation. We demonstrate our approach with a working example.

A corpus study of negative imperatives in natural language instructions

In this paper, we define the notion of a preventative expression and discuss a corpus study of such expressions in instructional text. We discuss our coding schema, which takes into account both form and function features, and present measures of inter-coder reliability for those features. We then discuss the correlations that exist between the function and the form features.

Building knowledge bases for the generation of software documentation

Automated text generation requires a underlying knowledge base from which to generate, which is often difficult to produce. Software documentation is one domain in which parts of this knowledge base may be derived automatically. In this paper, we describe DRAFTER, an authoring support tool for generating usercentred software documentation, and in particular, we describe how parts of its required knowledge base can be obtained automatically.

GENERATING PRECONDITION EXPRESSIONS IN INSTRUCTIONAL TEXT

This study employs a knowledge intensive corpus analysis to identify the elements of the communicative context which can be used to determine the appropriate lexical and grammatical form of instructional texts. IMAGENE, an instructional text generation system based on this analysis, is presented, particularly with reference to its expression of precondition relations.