Source authoring for multilingual generation of personalised object descriptions

We present the source authoring facilities of a natural language generation system that produces personalised descriptions of objects in multiple natural languages starting from language-independent symbolic information in ontologies and databases as well as pieces of canned text. The system has been tested in applications ranging from museum exhibitions to presentations of computer equipment for sale. We discuss the architecture of the overall system, the resources that the authors manipulate, the functionality of the authoring facilities, the system's personalisation mechanisms, and how they relate to source authoring. A usability evaluation of the authoring facilities is also presented, followed by more recent work on reusing information extracted from existing databases and documents, and supporting the OWL ontology specification language.