GHOSTWRITER
A demonstration of how plan-based modelling and natural language generation can be used to greatly assist human technical authors in the production of aircraft maintenance manuals
Overview
GhostWriter was a research project between British Aerospace Defence and
Dassault Aviation, with assistance from AIAI and the Department of AI.
Its primary objective was to design, develop and demonstrate a prototype
authoring environment so as to illustrate the kinds of proactive support
that are required by and that would benefit authors in the production of
technical documents.
Business Perspective
The volume of technical publications produced by and on behalf of each of
the two aerospace companies is very large. From a business perspective,
the motivation behind the GhostWriter project was to seek ways in which
the production of technical publications could be made more efficient and
reliable. GhostWriter had to demonstrate an approach that would pay for
itself in terms of the longer lifecycle of a publication, therefore the
project concentrated particularly on the technology that would enable
documents to be generated in English and French, and on knowledge-based
techniques that would enable the author to receive advice about possible
errors and omissions during the construction of a publication.
Technical Perspective
The cornerstone of the GhostWriter environment was the provision of meaningful
assistance for an author to affect the composition of a plan-based model
of the maintenance procedures to be carried out. This plan-based model was then
used as the language-neutral representation of the procedures from which texts
in different languages were generated. In exploiting this new approach, British
Aerospace Defence and Dassault Aviation would no longer need to translate a
text in one language to the equivalent text in other languages; instead, the
meaning of the text is first represented in a plan-based form that is not
dependent on any particular language and only then are the texts in various
languages generated.
Applications Perspective
The prototype has been used to demonstrate the interactive and semi-automatic
production of a significant portion of a complex maintenance procedure for the
Falcon 900 aircraft in both English and French. The resulting texts are at a
level close to that produced by human authors.
The prototype has been demonstrated to members of the Technical Publications
Department at British Aerospace and has received some praise, although further
work in knowledge acquisition is required before it can be used in earnest.
Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute