Basic Technology for Multilingual Theory and Practise: the Kpml Development Enviroment

The kpml development environment ooers a comfortable graphical and mouse-click oriented user interface for developing and maintaining large-scale sets of multilingual systemic-functional linguistic descriptions. Resource sets can be tested by static integrity checks and by application in text generation mode. Particular support is given for the development of descriptions for new language on the basis of already existing descriptions. Monolingual language descriptions can be freely and automatically merged to produce multilingual speciications. From these can be automatically extracted further monolingual or contrastive resource sets. Dynamic contrastive browsing of the resource sets is also supported, as well as contrastive generation. This paper brieey introduces the kpml system and some of its theoretical underpinnings, showing its use as a basis for multilingual generation work. The system is already used in a number of diverse multilingual generation projects and is freely available.