Drafter: An Interactive Support Tool For Writing

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. 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. 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: