Producing Instructions

This paper presents an environment that supports the production of instructions, exploiting methodologies and technologies from Human-Computer-Interaction, Natural Language Processing and Software Engineering. In this environment, instructions are automatically generated from task models. The environment includes an interactive tool to build task models, an extensible set of knowledge acquisition tools to further support the construction of task models, by obtaining the required knowledge from various knowledge sources, and a language generation tool that produces the instructions. Our system was originally designed to produce end-user documentation, in particular online help, but could also be used in learning environments. We present our environment, report on the evaluation we conducted, and discuss how we are intending to exploit this work as part of a learning environment.