The SAUT System
The SAUT system enables the user composing documents in a semantic form. The
current version is an initial one, but still can exemplify the potential within
this concept. The composing is done in an object oriented programming language
style, with usage of modern tools such as intellisense, auto complete,
tool tips, online syntax check and more. The user composes document in a
formal, unambiguous language, which can be used for efficient and accurate text
generation in many languages in no time. The system generates expressions in
the formalism of Conceptual Graphs.
While the user composes the document, he gets online feedback in natural
Language text, and in the formalism of conceptual graphs. During the document
composing the system generates the documetnt in natural language(English),
with some common text generation features such as aggregation,
pronouns and referring expression generation and so on.
The Benefits in Having a Formal Data on Natural Language Text
A formal representation of information, can be very beneficial since many
operations that cannot be done on a natural language text, can be done on such
a formal representation. Of course this fact would be false when a tool that
transforms text in natural language to a formal representation will be present.
With formal representation you can probably get very high performance in
missions like translation to any natural language, question answering,
automatic summarization and more.
The Need for an Authoring Tool
Many different formalisms of meaning representation languages are available, but
writing an utterance in one of them is a task that cannot be done by a common
user. Almost only researchers from the relevant fields are capable of writing
content in such languages, and even for them the process is to much time
consuming for being usable for practical uses. In the practical uses of these
schemes, expressions are being generated by computer programs.
SAUT Can Be Used For...
Composing documents using SAUT, will probably be slower than composing in natural
language, even when the technology will improve. So what do I need SAUT for?
When the representation of your information in natural language is sufficient
for you, you need not to deal with semantic authoring. But if you need your
information presented in several languages, or you want to be able to perform
intelligent information retrievals and question answering on your information,
semantic authoring might turn out to be what you need. The semantic authoring
can be useful for technical documentation, international documents generation,
legal documents and more.
About
SAUT was developed as a project of the NLP research group
of Comuter Science dpt., Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, Israel,
as part of the M.Sc thesis of Ofer Biller.