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<Paper uid="A97-1038">
  <Title>CogentHelp: NLG meets SE in a tool for authoring dynamically generated on-line help</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> CogentHelp is a prototype tool for authoring dynamically generated on-line help for applications with graphical user interfaces (GUIs). In this paper, we describe CogentHelp, highlighting the usefulness of certain natural language generation (NLG) techniques in supporting software-engineering (SE) goals for help authoring tools -- principally, quality and evolvability of help texts.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> To our knowledge, CogentHelp is unique in that it is the first operational prototype to embody the &amp;quot;evolution-friendly&amp;quot; properties of tools in the literate programming tradition (Knuth, 1992) -- e.g., the by now well-known j avadoc utility for generating API documentation from comments embedded in Java source code (Friendly, 1995; cf. also Johnson and Erdem, 1995; Priestly et al., 1996; Korgen, 1996) -- in a tool for generating end user-level documentation. CogentHelp is also unusual in that it is (to date) one of the few tools to bring NLG techniques to bear on the problem of authoring dynamically generated documents (cf. Paris and Vander Linden, 1996; Knott et al., 1996; Hirst and Di-Marco, 1995); traditionally, most applied NLG systems have focused on niches where texts can be generated fully automatically, such as routine reports of various types (e.g. Goldberg et al., 1994; Kukich et al., 1994) or explanations of expert system reasoning (cf. Moore, 1995 and references therein).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> While striving to design highly sophisticated, fully automatic systems has undoubtedly led to a deeper understanding of the text generation process, it has had the unfortunate effect (to date) of limiting the use of techniques pioneered in the NLG community to just a few niches where high knowledge acquisition costs stand a chance of being balanced by substantial volume of needed texts (cf. Reiter and Mellish, 1993). By joining the emerging authoring support crowd and endeavoring to create new opportunities in automated documentation, we hope to contribute to the broader acceptance and visibility of NLG technology in the overall computing community.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 we discuss the software engineering goals for CogentHelp. In Section 3 we provide background on automated documentation and identify where CogentHelp fits in this picture. In Section 4 we give a brief overview of the CogentHelp system.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> In Section 5, we highlight the NLG techniques used in support of the software engineering goals identified in Section 2. In Section 6 we describe CogentHelp's authoring interface. Finally, in Section 7 we conclude by discussing the outlook for CogentHelp's use and further development.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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