DRAFTER 
Crcile Pads" and Keith Vander Linden t 
Information Technology Research Institute 
University of Brighton 
Brighton BN2 4AT, UK 
email." { clp,knvl} @itri.bfighton.ac.uk 
Web Page: hap://www.itri.bfighton.ac.uk/projects/drafter 
DRAFTER is an interactive tool designed to as- 
sist technical authors in the production of English 
and French end-user manuals for software sys- 
tems. Unlike current generation systems, which 
aim at the automated production of instructions 
and thus keep the authors out of the loop, Drafter 
is a support tool intended to be integrated in the 
technical author's working environment, hope- 
dally automating some of the more tedious aspects 
of the authors' tasks. 
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 spec- 
ify the portions that cannot be acquired automat- 
ically, and provides for a parallel development of 
knowledge base and natural language text. 
The Drafter architecture is based on a user re- 
quirements analysis (Power et al., 1994). As 
shown in Figure 1, the system contains two main 
modules: 
• A developer's tool: This allows tech- 
nical authors to specify formally the 
procedures necessary for the user to 
achieve their goals, thus supporting 
user-oriented instructions. It also al- 
lows them to control the drafting pro- 
cess. 
* Starting this Fall, Dr. Paris' address will be CSIRO, 
Division of Information Technology, Sydney Laboratory, 
Building E6B, Macquarie University Campus, North Ryde, 
Sydney, NSW 2113, Australia. 
tArter September 1, Dr. Vander Linden's address 
will be Department of Mathematics and Computer Sci- 
ence, Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI 49546, USA, 
kvlinden@calvin.edu. 
• The automated drafter: This com- 
prises two major components: the text 
planner (or strategic planner) and the 
tactical generator. The text planner de- 
termines the content and structure of the 
text, and the tactical generator performs 
the realization of the sentences. The re- 
sult is English and French drafts of the 
instructions for the procedures defined 
so far by the author using the devel- 
oper's tool. 
Underlying the processing components is a Do- 
main knowledge base, which is the main repos- 
itory of information about the domain. This 
knowledge base is implemented in Loom (Mac- 
Gregor, 1988). 
Walkthrough of the System 
In this demo, we illustrate how a technical au- 
thor would work with DRAFTER. Our example 
involves defining the procedure for saving a new 
file in a Microsoft Word-like text editor, and then 
to generate text for that procedure. It is easi- 
est for the technical writer if the process starts 
by defining the interface to be documented with 
some interface building tool. To show the feasi- 
bility of this approach, we implemented parts of 
the text editor's functions in VisualWorks (Visual- 
Works, 1994), a widely available interface design 
environment. 
Drafter then has facilities for reading the in- 
terface definition produced by VisualWorks in 
Smalltalk, and finding all the objects relevant for 
the generation of the instructions. It can also in- 
fer some of the actions involved in using these 
13 
Author • 
Developer's 
Tool 
Knowledge 1 Editor 
Knowledge 1 Visualiser 
Draft Text 1 Viewer 
I Interface 
Design 
Specification 
Domain Knowledge Base 
T-box (terminology) -/ ~_ 
I 
t .... I ..... i ........ t ..... 
.................... i i A-box (assertions) I ~:~ , 
0 o 
Automated Drafter 
Text Planner 
~-~ Planning Engine \] 
Tactical Generator 
Sentence Planner 
Surface Realisation 
Figure 1" Block Diagram of the Architecture 
objects. It uses this information to define a set 
of object and action entities in the Drafter knowl- 
edge base for use in text generation. These actions 
and objects can then be used by the technical au- 
thor as building blocks to specify tasks (Paris and 
Vander Linden, 1996a). Clearly, however, the 
entities acquired automatically are not all that is 
needed to document the interface properly. Be- 
cause of this (and because of the potential for the 
user to be without a supported interface design 
tool like VisualWorks), Drafter provides a man- 
ual definition facility. This facility is based on an 
English pseudo-text grammar (Paris and Vander 
Linden, 1996b), which allows the author to use a 
relative simple pseudo-text to specify a complex 
configuration of action and object entities and the 
relations between them. 
Once the action nodes of the graph have been 
created, or perhaps while they are being cre- 
ated, the author has the ability to link them to- 
gether using a set of predefined procedural rela- 
tions: goal, precondition, sub-action, side-effect, 
warning, and cancellation. This is done in the 
workspace, with a graphical outlining mechanism. 
This mechanism allows authors to drag actions 
from the ACTIONS pane and drop them on the var- 
ious procedural relation slots in the workspace 
pane, or, alternatively, to create new actions to fill 
the slots. The result is a procedural hierarchy such 
as the one shown in outline form in Figure 2. 
In this screen, the WORKSPACE pane contains 
the procedure being documented in an outline for- 
mat. The outer box represents the main user goal 
of saving a document, a goal which is achieved 
by executing all the actions inside the box. It con- 
tains a single method specifying a cancellation 
14 
INTERFACE WORKSPACE 
s~r~e nrt~Cr~, aane.n~ent Saw Changes Window 
Cancel Button ~,'1 .... ..... ~,, . Cmce~a~ lou#s~e~ ~1 
Save As File Window il 
Dlre¢toryflsUng Scrolling L 
Save Button 
Cancel Button 
Microsoft Word Window 
Save File Button 
rd 
ACTIONS 
s~,~ arn/tran, oo~ment ~t 
Qu# Save A,~ File Window 
Click On Cancet Button )~l~J ..... ( 
Choo,,~SaveOpticnFro, CancellaUon Method Click On Save File Butts 
Type Name Of Arbitrary D~ Open Save As Method 1 
Click On Save Button Open Save As Method 2 
Click On No Sutton Save Document Method 
Click On Yes Button 
C/ase Micro~tt Word Wlndot 
CIC~ Save As File Windo~ 
CIC~ Save Changes Window 
Open Microsoft Word Windo~ ~ 
Open Save Changes Window 
Choose Exit Option From File "~ 
Start Te~ Wold Program 
Ouff Test Word Program ;~ | 
t~ta ~ ccuak a 
\[7 
!FOCUS 
o~,~F~.~.,. I 
~ ?:~1 own .~,e ~ y~.tt~ I ! ~. opensaveAsAcetnoaelg\] 
Figure 2: Procedural hierarchy for Saving a file 
action (i.e., that the Save-As File window may be 
closed by performing a particular method), and 
a set of sub-steps (i.e., opening the Save-As File 
window, typing the name of the file and clicking 
the save button). 
Once a procedure is defined, the Automated 
Drafter takes the procedure specified with the De- 
veloper's Tool and produces text expressing that 
procedure. The text generation in Drafter is sup- 
ported by the reuse (and extension) of three pre- 
existing tools: 
• The Moore and Paris Text Planner 
(Moore and Paris, 1993); 
• The IMAGENE Sentence Planner (Vander 
Linden and Martin, 1995); 
• The KPML tactical generator (Bateman, 
1996). 
The first two tools operate in sequence, plan- 
ning, respectively, the high-level rhetorical struc- 
ture of the text and the low-level grammatical 
details of the sentences. When this is finished, the 
KgML generator is called, once for each sentence, 
to produce the actual text. The text is produced in 
English and in French. We are largely using the 
Nigel grammar for English (Mann, 1985), but are 
developing within the KPML enviroment a gram- 
mar for French. One of the texts produced for the 
Save a File procedure is shown in Figure 3. 
Acknowledgements 
DRAFTER also involves two industrial partners: 
Integral Solutions Limited (ISL), a sofrware com- 
pany specialising in artificial intelligence prod- 
ucts, and Praetofius Ltd., a leading translation 
and technical writing consultancy specialising in 
software documentation. Other members of the 
project include Anthony Hartley, Markus Fischer, 
Lyn Pemberton, Richard Power and Donia Scott. 
15 
English: 
To Save a Document 
1. Open the Save As File window, by 
choosing the Save option on the file menu 
or by clicking on the Save File button. 
2. Type a name in the Filenamestring field. 
3. Click on the Save button. 
You can quit the Save As dialog box by 
clicking on the Cancel button. 
French: 
Enregistrement d'un document 
1. Ouvrir la fen&re Save As File, en choisissant 
l'option Save sur le menu File ou en cliquaat sur 
le bouton Save File. 
2. Introduire un titre dans la zone de texte File- 
narnestring. 
3. Cliquer sur le bouton Save. 
Vous pouvez quitter la fen&re Save As File en 
cliquant sur le bouton Cancel. 
Figure 3: Generated English and French Drafts 
We are also grateful to Jon Barber who assisted in 
the implementation of this system. 
This work is partially supported by the Engi- 
neering and Physical Sciences Research Coun- 
cil (EPSRC) Grant J19221, by BC/DAAD ARC 
Project 293, by the Commission of the European 
Union Grant LRE-62009, and by the ONR grant 
N00014-96-1-0465. 

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