SPLAT: A sentence-plan authoring tool

SPLAT (Sentence Plan Language Authoring Tool) is an authoring tool intended to facilitate the creation of sentence-plan specifications for the Penman natural language generation system. SPLAT uses an examplebased approach in the form of sentence.plan templates to aid the user in creating and maintaining sentence plans. SPLAT also contains a sentence bank, a user-extensible collection of sentence plans annotated in various ways. The sentence bank can be searched for candidate plans that can then be used in the creation of new sentence plans specific to the domain of interest. SPLAT's graphical environment provides additional support to the user in the form of menu-driven access to Penman's linguistic resources and management of partially built sentence plans. 1 I n t r o d u c t i o n As natural language generation systems become more complex and sophisticated, the mode of input to these systems is becoming correspondingly more difficult to specify and manage. Currently, sentence plans must be created by experts who are very knowledgeable about both linguistic theory and the characteristics of the particular generation system. In order to facilitate the growth of natural language generation research, systems should be able to handle more complex input, but at the same time should be more accessible to non-experts. To accomplish these goals requires a facility that aids the user in creating and maintaining the desired input specifications in a principled and convenient way. Such a facility, should have both theoretical knowledge of the allowable form and content of the input specifications, and the practical ability to ensure that only syntactically correct specifications are entered. Ideally, it should also maintain a library of sample input specifications so that the user need not reconstruct existing specifications, but can construct new ones from an existing set. As well, such a facility should provide access to a range of resources, such as grammars and other linguistic resources that can aid the user in input development. SPLAT is a first attempt to provide such a facility for the Penman generation system in the form of an authoring tool for Sentence Plan Lan-