Generating Multilingual Documents from a Knowledge Base: The TECHDOC Project

TL;DR

The paper presents TECHDOC, a system that generates multilingual technical documents from a language-independent knowledge base, focusing on user instructions and incorporating recent enhancements like event simulation and multimodal interfaces.

Contribution

It introduces a novel system architecture for multilingual document generation from a knowledge base, including recent developments such as event simulation and multimodal user interaction.

Findings

Feasibility demonstrated for multilingual technical document generation

System architecture supports plan-based content creation

Recent enhancements improve usability and functionality

Abstract

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. (slightly corrected version of a paper to appear in: COLING 94, Proceedings)