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<Paper uid="W96-0504">
  <Title>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 &amp;quot;~ Start Te~ Wold Program Ouff Test Word Program ;~ |</Title>
  <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="14" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
DRAFTER
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> DRAFTER is an interactive tool designed to assist technical authors in the production of English and French end-user manuals 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 a support tool intended to be integrated in the technical author's working environment, hopedally automating some of the more tedious aspects of the authors' tasks.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> 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 text.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The Drafter architecture is based on a user requirements analysis (Power et al., 1994). As shown in Figure 1, the system contains two main modules: * A developer's tool: This allows technical authors to specify formally the procedures necessary for the user to achieve their goals, thus supporting user-oriented instructions. It also allows them to control the drafting process. null * 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.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> tArter September 1, Dr. Vander Linden's address will be Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI 49546, USA, kvlinden@calvin.edu.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> * The automated drafter: This comprises two major components: the text planner (or strategic planner) and the tactical generator. The text planner determines the content and structure of the text, and the tactical generator performs the realization of the sentences. The result is English and French drafts of the instructions for the procedures defined so far by the author using the developer's tool.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> Underlying the processing components is a Domain knowledge base, which is the main repository of information about the domain. This knowledge base is implemented in Loom (Mac-Gregor, 1988).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> Walkthrough of the System In this demo, we illustrate how a technical author 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 easiest for the technical writer if the process starts by defining the interface to be documented with some interface building tool. To show the feasibility of this approach, we implemented parts of the text editor's functions in VisualWorks (Visual-Works, 1994), a widely available interface design environment.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> Drafter then has facilities for reading the interface definition produced by VisualWorks in Smalltalk, and finding all the objects relevant for the generation of the instructions. It can also infer some of the actions involved in using these  objects. It uses this information to define a set of object and action entities in the Drafter knowledge base for use in text generation. These actions and objects can then be used by the technical author 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. Because of this (and because of the potential for the user to be without a supported interface design tool like VisualWorks), Drafter provides a manual 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.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> Once the action nodes of the graph have been created, or perhaps while they are being created, the author has the ability to link them together using a set of predefined procedural relations: 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 various 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.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> In this screen, the WORKSPACE pane contains the procedure being documented in an outline format. 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 contains a single method specifying a cancellation  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).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="10"> Once a procedure is defined, the Automated Drafter takes the procedure specified with the Developer's Tool and produces text expressing that procedure. The text generation in Drafter is supported by the reuse (and extension) of three pre-existing tools:  The first two tools operate in sequence, planning, respectively, the high-level rhetorical structure 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 grammar for French. One of the texts produced for the Save a File procedure is shown in Figure 3.</Paragraph>
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