Natural language generation is now moving away from research prototypes
into more practical
applications. Generation functionality is also being asked to play a more
significant role in
established applications such as machine translation. In both cases,
multilingual generation
techniques have much to offer. However, the take-up of multilingual generation
is being
restricted by a critical lack both of large-scale linguistic resources
suited
to the generation
task and of appropriate development environments. This paper describes
KPML, a multilingual
development environment that offers one possible solution to these problems.
KPML aims to
provide generation projects with standardized, broad-coverage, reusable
resources and a
basic engine for using such resources for generation. A variety of focused
debugging aids
ensure efficient maintenance, while supporting multilingual work such as
contrastive language
development and automatic merging of independently developed resources.
KPML is based on
a new, generic approach to multilinguality in resource description that
extends significantly
beyond previous approaches. The system has already been used in a number
of large
generation projects and is freely available to the generation community.