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<Paper uid="P98-2173">
  <Title>Multilingual authoring using feedback texts</Title>
  <Section position="6" start_page="1057" end_page="1058" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
3 Significance of WYSIWYM editing
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> WYSIWYM editing is a new idea that requires practical testing. We have not yet carried out formal usability trials, nor investigated the design of feedback texts (e.g. how best to word the anchors), nor confirmed that adequate response times could be obtained for full-scale applications. However, if satisfactory large-scale implementations prove feasible, the method brings many potential benefits.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> * A document in natural language (possibly accompanied by diagrams) is the most flexible existing medium for presenting information. We cannot be sure that all meanings can be expressed clearly in network diagrams or other specialized presentations; we can be sure they can be expressed in a document.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> * It seems intuitively obvious that authors will understand feedback texts much better than they understand alternative methods of presenting knowledge bases, such as network diagrams. Our experience has been that people can learn to use the DRAFTER-II system in a few minutes.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> * Authors require no training in a controlled language or any other presentational convention. This avoids the expense of initial training; it also means that presentational conventions need not be relearned when a knowledge base is re-examined after a delay of months or years.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> * Since the knowledge base is presented through a document in natural language, it becomes immediately accessible to anyone peripherally concerned with the project (e.g. management, public relations, domain experts from related projects). Documentation of the knowledge base, often a tedious and time-consuming task, becomes automatic.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> * The model can be viewed and edited in any natural language that is supported by the generator; further languages can be added as needed. When supported by a multilingual natural language generation system, as in DRAFTER-II, WYSIWYM editing obviates the need for traditional language localisation of the human-computer interface.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> New linguistic styles can also be added (e.g.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> a terminology suitable for novices rather than experts).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> * As a result, WYSIWYM editing is ideal for facilitating knowledge sharing and transfer within a multilingual project. Speakers of several different languages could collectively edit the same knowledge base, each user viewing and modifying the knowledge in his/her own language.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> * Since the knowledge base is presented as a document, large knowledge bases can be  navigated by the methods familiar from books and from complex electronic documents (e.g. contents page, index, hyper-text links), obviating any need for special training in navigation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="10"> The crucial advantage of WYSIWYM editing, compared with alternative natural language interfaces, is that it eliminates all the usual problems associated with parsing and semantic interpretation. Feedback texts with menus have been used before in the NL-Menu system (Tennant et al., 1983), but only as a means of presenting syntactic options. NL-Menu guides the author by listing the extensions of the current sentence that are covered by its grammar; in this way it makes parsing more reliable, by enforcing adherence to a sub-language, but parsing and interpretation are still required. So far WYSIWYM editing has been implemented in two domains: software instructions (as described here), and patient information leaflets. We are currently evaluating the usability of these systems, partly to confirm that authors do indeed find them easy to use, and partly to investigate issues in the design of feed-back texts.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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