An Environment for Quick Ramp-Up Multi-lingual Authoring

The driving force behind controlled language document authoring systems has been the desire to bypass the knowledge-intensive (and thus time-intensive) and error-prone stage of analyzing the source text. More accurate and deeper analysis of source texts at a lower acquisition cost is possible if the vocabulary and syntax of the input text are kept as simple as possible. The multi-lingual translation system described in this paper capitalizes on this methodology and improves on it in several ways. Our system includes an easy to use machineassisted semantic analyzer, which automatically produces syntactic and semantic analyses that can be edited by the document author. On the generation side, we provide a "quick ramp-up" grammar acquisition environment, along with a very convenient and novel "visual grammar" interface. This paper will describe this complete environment for multilingual document authoring. The following four aspects of the system will be discussed: