Expressing procedural relationships in multilingual instructions

Abstract

In this paper we discuss a study of the expression of procedural relations in multilingual user instructions~ in particular the relations of Gene,ution and Enablement. These procedural relations are defined in terms of a plan representation model, and applied in a corpus study of English, French, and Portuguese instructions. The results of our analysis indicate specific guidelines for the tactical realisation of expressions of these relations in multilingual instructional text.

Multilingual Resource Sharing Across Both Related and Unrelated Languages: An Implemented, Open-Source Framework for Practical Natural Language Generation

“…Examples of varying rhetorical structures across translation equivalents found in work on the drafter system (Delin et al, 1994) viewpoint, this corresponds to rejecting the Chomskyan idea of a Universal Grammar, replacing it with the notion of a Typological Universal Grammar where it can be assumed both that languages differ and that shared characteristics will nevertheless be observed. Thus, although the German, French and English rhetorical organizations proposed by Delin et al (1994) are different, they are all drawn from a collectively shared and multilingually valid statement of rhetorical structure. The question remains, therefore, to what extent such system-level congruences can be maintained even though, as we saw in §1 with our example CADsoftware manual headings, individual texts and languages may make very different use of those systems during the generation of particular texts.…”

“…However, based on corpus work on instructional texts in Portuguese, Italian, English, French and German preparatory to designing the resources for the drafter-I multilingual text generation system, examples were found which even appeared to require different rhetorical structures. One such set of contrasting examples discussed in Delin et al (1994) is shown in Figure 1. The distinct rhetorical structures posited as text-level descriptions of the three 'translations' are quite different in their communicative force.…”

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“…This approach has occasionally been taken, as in Kantrowitz and Bates (1992) and Danlos (1987) 4 and, at least implicitly, in Paris and Scott (1994) and Delin et al (1994); however, under this approach, all of the flexibility and simplicity of modular design is lost.…”

An application of lexical semantics annotation to question-answering in e-farming

“…An earlier attempt for language generation is e.g. (Delin 1994). Semantic tags are either close to thematic roles (instrument, location, etc.)…”