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<Paper uid="P04-3030">
  <Title>Wysiwym with wider coverage</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Wysiwym (What You See Is What You Meant) is a user-interface technology through which a domain expert can formally encode knowledge by structured editing of an automatically generated feedback text (Power and Scott, 1998). The technology has hitherto addressed two practical contexts: the automatic production of multilingual technical documentation, and the formulation of queries to a database or expert system. In the first case, Wysiwym editing encodes the desired content of the document in an interlingua, from which versions can be generated in mutliple languages; in the second case, it yields a query encoded in a formal query language such as SQL. The benefit is the same in either context: since editing is mediated througha presentation in natural language, there is no need for the user to beacquainted with the formal details of knowledge representation or query languages.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Elsewhere (Evans and Power, 2003) we have described a library package for developing Wysiwym applications. This package was a consolidation of work carried out in a series of early applications (Power and Scott, 1998; Piwek et al., 2000; Bouayad-Agha et al., 2002), requiring a very restricted linguistic coverage, especially as regards the range of clausal and nominal patterns. We present here an extension to this library which allows a coverage more in line with general-purpose generators like FUF/SURGE (Elhadad and Robin, 1992), KPML/PENMAN (Bateman, 1996) and Real-Pro (Lavoie and Rambow, 1997). The extension is based on two new ideas: first, a change to the underlying semantic model, replacing atomic entity types with feature structures; secondly, a corresponding change in the user interface, which now offers an extra editing operation (called reconfiguration) through which complex entity types may be modified. The purpose of this paper (and the accompanying demonstration) is to describe these novelties.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2">  In early Wysiwym applications, the editing process served to build an A-box like that shown in figure 1, comprising a set of entities (represented by rectangles), each entity having a simple type (represented by labels within rectangles) and a set of relationships (represented by labelled arcs). The graph in this figure is rooted in a take entity, denoting a taking event, the participants being a patient entity (the taker) and an an aspirin entity (the takee). The intended meaning of the graph is expressed by the English sentence 'the patient takes an aspirin'.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The construction of the graph through Wysiwym editing proceeds as follows. The starting point is an empty A-box, which consists only in a constraint on the root entity -- for instance, the requirement that it should be some kind of event. This unpromising A-box is supplied as input to a natural language generator with two special features: (a) it can generate texts from an A-box in any state of completion (even empty); (b) it can generate menus opening on anchors within the text, in addition to the text itself. The resulting feedback text is presented to the user through a special interface in which some spans are mouse-sensitive anchors, marking points where a new entity may be added to the A-box. Anchors are normally shown through a colour code; here we will employ square brackets: [Some event].</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> When the user mouse-clicks on an anchor, a menu pops up listing all entity types allowed in the relevant context -- in this case, all event types.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5">  After the user chooses one of these options, such as 'take', a new entity of the specified type is created, and added to the A-box at the current location (in this case, the rootof thegraph). Assuming the ontology decrees that a take event has two participants, a person and an object, the new A-box will include two anchors allowing these entities to be defined: [Some person] takes [some object].</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> Opening the anchor 'some person' will yield a list of options including 'patient'; opening 'some object' will yield options including 'an aspirin'; in this way two more entities can be introduced, so obtaining the complete graph in figure 1.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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