There has been much interest lately in the automatic generation of documentation; however, much of this research has not considered the cost involved in the production of the natural language generation systems to be a major issue: the benefits obtained from automating the construction of the documentation should outweigh the cost of designing and coding the knowledge base.
This study is centred on the generation of instructional text, as is found in instruction manuals for household appliances. We show how knowledge about a device that already exists as part of the engineering effort, together with adequate, domain-independent knowledge about the environment, can be used for reasoning about natural language instructions.
The knowledge selected for communication can be planned for, and all the knowledge necessary for the planning should be contained (possibly in a more abstract form) in the knowledge of the artifact together with the world knowledge. We present the planning knowledge for two example domains, in the form of axioms in the situation calculus. This planning knowledge formally characterizes the behaviour of the artifact, and it is used to produce a basic plan of actions that both the device and user take to accomplish a given goal. We explain how the instructions are generated from the basic plan. This plan is then used to derive further plans for states to be avoided. We will also explain how warning instructions about potentially dangerous situations are generated from these plans. These ideas have been implemented using Prolog and the Penman natural language generation system.
Finally, this thesis makes the claim that the planning knowledge should be derivable from the device and world knowledge; thus the need for cost effectiveness would be met. To this end, we suggest a framework for an integrated approach to device design and instruction generation.
", download = "ftp://ftp.cs.toronto.edu/csri-technical-reports/329/TR-329.ps.gz", note = "Published as technical report CSRI-329" }