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<Paper uid="W98-1435">
  <Title>ConceptDvpt:D Eclaircies Ciel se D~gageant .. &amp;quot; . Concept Nuages Devenant Moins Nombreux Concept jOiel:!Devenant Moins Nuageux .... : -: .: .... .. : Concept :Dvpt ~De~mides Eclairc es</Title>
  <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
SYSTEM DEMONSTRATION
INTERACTIVE GENERATION AND
KNOWLEDGE ADMINISTRATION IN MULTIMETEO
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Generally, it takes &amp;quot;exotic&amp;quot; (linguists, knowledge engineers) manpower to maintain, and adapt a NLG system. To avoid this problem, we have developed a Knowledge Administration * station, which is usable by the target population (in our project, weather forecasters).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> On the other hand, the system is designed to help the forecasters and not replace them. It is able to adapt to each forecaster's style and manage enhancements* they wish to bring to their texts. With that in mind, the Interactive Generation environment was designed to allow forecasters to modify generated texts in their native language, and then generate weather forecasts in several foreign languages based on those modifications.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Interactive* Generation is a viable alternative to Automatic Translation.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="301" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
2. MultiMeteo
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> 2.1. General motivation The European weather forecast market is no longer limited to the national level. Travelling is growing rapidly, with an increasing number of people going abroad, for both personal and professional reasons. Markets for meteorological forecasts tend to overlap borders and thus need multilingual tools. The volumes involved are high, and time constraints for producing fresh usable information are stringent: several hundreds of bulletins for each Weather Office, produced several times a day.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> End users have also become* much more demanding about quality and tailoring, which here are realised by different styles of weather forecast.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> 1.2. Goal and characteristics of MultiMeteo The g0al of the MultiMeteo projectis to build an automatic multilingual short-report generation system, and to use it in the Meteorology field for producing weather forecasts from structured data I. i Other weather-forecast generation systems are FoG \[Goldberg et al. 94\], Weathra \[Sigurt et al. 92\], MET90 \[Sigurt et al. 96\], and METEOVIS \[Kerpedjiev &amp; Noncheva 90\]</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> This system will allow European forecasters to automatically produce texts in English, French, German, Spanish, and Dutch.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> MultiMeteo is a 3-year project funded partially by the Language Engineering programme of the European Commission, and partially by European weather offices. It involves around 40 people in France, Spain, Austria and Belgium. There are around 15 pilot sites in Europe, which are representative of different meteorological characteristics (south, north, plain, mountain, sea, etc.). In each site, 3 or 4 styles willbe  developed (local and regional general public, seaside general public, fun-board sport oriented, etc.). 3. Interactive Generation and Knowledge Administration</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> In the above menu, alternative concepts are proposed, and several types of modifiers (modality, phase, etc.) can be added.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> For example, if. the concept &amp;quot;Eclaircies devenant un peu plus franches&amp;quot; (Sunny spells becoming more extensive) is selected, the System generates the following text: METEO-FRANCE, centre d~partemental du Mans. Voici le bull~ pour la zone de la vallee du Loir.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9">  Once the forecaster saves the result, MultiMeteo generates the weather forecast in all the selected * languages (which are English, Spanish and German). Of course his/her modifications are taken into * account i n all of the languages. : In addition, MultiMeteo offers a Knowledge Administration station, which allows the administrator to modify the style of the texts to be generated, in terms of default structure, titles, order between paragraphs, available models of paragraphs, type of sentences used (telegraphic / non telegraphic), terms to be used, etc.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="10"> In fact, there are two levels of administration: central and *local. Certain functions are specific to the central administration, such as the creation of a new style from scratch, or the management of the multilingual terminology. *</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="3" start_page="301" end_page="302" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
4. Technical Characteristics
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> MultiMeteo runs under PC/Windows 95 (or more), Windows NT and Unix station/Solaris2. The input is a numerical matrix, where columns are the meteorological parameters and rows are time steps. The output is an HTML or RTF file that contains one or more weather forecasts.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1">  The FEM, the Administration, and the Help are written in JAVA.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The Generation Server is based on ERLI's AlethGen toolbox, which has already been used for generating texts, in particular for producing correspondence for a leading French mail-order company (see \[Coch 1996a\] and \[Coch 1996b\]). AlethGen is divided in an engine (written in C++) and Knowledge Bases. The approach is inspired by the Meaning-Text Theory</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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