Automatic generation of technical documentation

Natural-language generation (NLG) techniques can be used to automatically produce technical documentation from a domain knowledge base and linguistic and contextual models. We discuss this application of NLG technology from both a technical and a usefulness (costs and benefits) perspective. This discussion is based largely on our experiences with the Intelligent Documentation Advisory System (IDAS) documentation-generation project, and the reactions that various interested people from industry have had to IDAS. We hope that this summary of our experiences with IDAS and the lessons we have learned from it will be beneficial for other researchers who wish to build technical documentation-generation systems.

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