Abstract

In this paper, we present drafter, an interactive drafting tool which supports technical authors in their task of writing multilingual documentation for software systems. Unlike current generation systems which aim at the automated production of instructions and thus keep the authors out of the loop, drafter is an interactive support tool intended to be integrated in the technical author's working environment. To this end, it was designed based on a user requirements analysis. drafter tries to automate some of the more tedious aspects of the authors' tasks and support them in writing multilingual documentation. As with any generation system, drafter requires a semantic knowledge base from which text can be generated. While drafter obtains as much as it can of this knowledge base automatically from external sources, it also allows the authors to specify the portions that cannot be acquired automatically, and provides for a parallel development of knowledge base and natural language tex...

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