Abstract
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.
Zusammenfassung
Die Verfügbarkeit technischer Dokumente in mehreren Sprachen wird besonders in Europa immer bedeutsamer. Um das Dokumentationsproblem zu lösen, schlagen wir vor, die Möglichkeiten der automatischen Sprachgenerierung auszuschöpfen. Wir haben mehrsprachige Automobilhandbücher, speziell Wartungsinformationen, auf das zugrundeliegende technische Wissen sowie auf Textstrukturen hin untersucht. Daraus entstand das Design eines Systems zur automatischen, mehrsprachigen Generierung solcher Handbücher. TECHDOC erstellt aus einer Wissensbasis mit Gebietswissen zunächst eine sprachunabhängige Textrepräsentation, die dann in eine Folge von Satzplänen transformiert wird. Diese werden schließlich sprachspezifischen Satzgeneratoren zur Textproduktion übergeben.
Part of the work reported in this paper has been carried out during an internship at FAW Ulm funded from the ICSI exchange program. Thereafter, the work has been supported by a University of Toronto Open Doctoral Fellowship.
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Rösner, D., Stede, M. (1992). TECHDOC: A System for the Automatic Production of Multilingual Technical Documents. In: Görz, G. (eds) Konvens 92. Informatik aktuell. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-77809-4_34
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-77809-4_34
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