JYAG & IDEY: A Template-Based Generator and Its Authoring Tool

Abstract

JYAG (Java 2.0 Platform YAG) is the Java implementation of a real-time, general-purpose, template-based generation system (YAG, Yet Another Generator) (Channarukul 1999; McRoy, Channarukul, & Ali 2000). JYAG enables interactive applications to adapt natural language output to the interactive context without requiring developers to write all possible output strings ahead of time or to embed extensive knowledge of the grammar of the target language in the application. Currently, designers of interactive systems who might wish to include dynamically generated text face a number of barriers; for example designers must decide (1) How hard will it be to link the application to the generator? (2) Will the generator be fast enough? (3) How much linguistic information will the application need to provide in order to get reasonable quality output? (4) How much effort will be required to write a generation grammar that covers all the potential outputs of the application? The design and implementation of our template-based generation system, JYAG, is intended to address each of these concerns. A template-based approach to text realization requires an application developer to define templates to be used at generation time; therefore, the tasks of designing, testing, and maintaining templates are inevitable. JYAG provides a set of pre-defined templates. Developers may also define their own templates to fit the requirements of a domain-specific application. Those templates might be totally new or they can be a variation of existing templates. Even though developers can author a template by manually editing its textual definition in a text file (in YAG’s declarative format or XML), it is more convenient and efficient if they can perform such tasks in a graphical, integrated development environment. A developer might have to spend a substantial amount of time dealing with syntax familiarization, authoring templates, testing their natural language output, and managing them. IDEY (Integrated Development Environment for YAG) provides these services as a tool for JYAG’s templates authoring, testing, and managing. IDEY’s graphical interface reduces the amount of time needed for syntax familiarization through direct manipulation and tem-