This paper presents an analysis conducted on a corpus of software instructions in French in order to establish whether task structure elements (the procedural representation of the users' tasks) are alone sufficient to control the grammatical resources of a text generator. We show that the construct of genre provides a useful additional source of control enabling us to resolve undetermined cases.
The results from our linguistic analysis are consistent with other research on sublanguages in the instructions domain, in both French and English, e.g., @cite_5 @cite_4 . Our analysis goes beyond previous work by identifying within the discourse context the means for exercising explicit control over a text generator.
@cite_5 @cite_4
2047374384 2131196772
This paper discusses an approach to planning the content of instructional texts. The research is based on a corpus study of 15 French procedural texts ranging from step-by-step device manuals to general artistic procedures. The approach taken starts from an AI task planner building a task representation, from which semantic carriers are selected. The most appropriate RST relations to communicate these carriers are then chosen according to heuristics developed during the corpus analysis. Instructional texts have been the object of many studies recently, motivated by the increased need to produce manuals (especially multilingual manuals) coupled with the cost of translators and technical writers. Because these studies concentrate on aspects other than the linguistic realisation of instructions -- for example, the integration of text and graphics - they all generate a sequence of steps required to achieve a task, using imperatives. Our research so far shows, however, that manuals can in fact have different styles, i. e., not all instructions are stated using a sequence of imperatives, and that, furthermore, different parts of manuals often use different styles. In this paper, we present our preliminary results from an analysis of over 30 user guides manuals for consumer appliances and discuss some of the implications.