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<Paper uid="W96-0414">
  <Title>A Study of some Lexical Differences between French and English Instructions in a Multilingual Generation Framework* Farid Cerbah Dassault Aviation</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="131" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Technical documentation appears as a promising application area for text generation* Several works (\[18, 17, 6, 12, 7\] l) demonstrate that NLG techniques may contribute in the future to make technical documentation more reliable and maintainable. Many of these contributions are concerned with multilingual generation, which is often presented as an alternative to Machine Translation. The multilingual generation approach stipulates that technical documents, such as maintenance manuals, can be generated automatically in several *This paper partly covers a work made by the au- null languages from knowledge bases used in design processes or constructed for the purpose of automatic documentation production.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> GhostWriter is a bilingual generation system under development at Dassault Aviation and British Aerospace. Our objective in this project is to show how French and English maintenance procedures can be generated from an abstract representation of underlying action plans expressed in a formalism inspired by AI planning models. The role of the text generator is to propose bilingual drafts of procedural texts intended to be integrated in maintenance manuals, and to perform rephrasing operations which may be requested by the technical author, for example grouping maintenance instructions at surface level or changing the specificity level of an instruction.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The design of a multilingual generation system, needless to say, requires a precise analysis of the linguistic means used by each language to express the same conceptual content. The aim of this paper is to describe the main verbal differences observed in a bilingual corpus of procedural texts and to analyse their impacts on the lexicalisation mechanisnm of the sentence generation system GLOSE \[4\] used in GhostWriter.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The structure of this paper is as follows. I give in section 2 an overview of GLOSE. Then, I discuss brieily in the next section the corpus analysis and its role in the design of the multilingual generation system. Sections 4 and 5 focus on specific types of lexical differences and the related lexicalisation mechanisms. Finally, the conclusion will describe some lexical divergences which may require the introduction of language-specific semantic representations.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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