Generating Multilingual Documents from a Knowledge Base: The TECHDOC Project

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)