Transformation of TOSCA to natural language texts

Cloud computing changes the way businesses plan, use and manage their IT systems and resources. Different cloud providers offer distinctive interfaces for the deployment and management of applications in their respective cloud environments. The organization OASIS addresses these circumstances with the Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA). This standard offers a language to express applications as directed graphs and their management behavior in a standardized and vendor-independent manner. In numerous roles in the development, a textual description of the application, its entities and their relationships, for instance to serve as textual documentation, is of use. The TOSCA standard places no restriction on the complexity of a topology graph. Therefore, a textual representation of the graph can also get arbitrarily large and complex. Additionally, every change has to be reflected in the documentation accordingly. Consequently, an automated approach to the generation of such textual representations is preferable. This work describes a concept for the automated generation of textual descriptions of TOSCA topology graphs. This is accomplished by combining typical tasks from natural language generation with domain-specific information in order to generate appropriate textual descriptions. The concept is implemented in a prototype and validated in a use-case scenario.Cloud Computing verändert die Planung, den Einsatz und das Management von informationstechnologischen Systemen in Unternehmen. Verschiedene Anbieter von Cloudservices bieten unterschiedliche Schnittstellen, um Deployment und Management von Applikationen in ihrer angebotenen Cloudumgebung zu ermöglichen. Die Organisation OASIS adressiert diesen Sachverhalt mit der Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA). Dieser Standard bietet eine Sprache, um Applikationen als gerichteten Topologiegraphen und ihr Managementverhalten standardisiert und anbieterunabhängig zu beschreiben. In den unterschiedlichen Rollen der Entwicklung ist oftmals eine textuelle Beschreibung der Applikation, ihrer Komponenten und deren Beziehungen untereinander, beispielsweise zu Dokumentationszwecken, wünschenswert. Da der TOSCA Standard keine Restriktionen bezüglich der Komplexität eines Topologiegraphen setzt, kann auch eine textuelle Repräsentation eines solchen Graphen beliebig komplex werden. Zudem muss jede Änderung entsprechend in der textuellen Dokumentation angepasst werden. Daher ist ein automatisiertes Verfahren zu Generierung solcher textueller Beschreibungen erstrebenswert. Diese Arbeit beschreibt ein Konzept zur automatisierten Generierung textueller Repräsentationen von TOSCA Topologiegraphen. Dazu werden Aufgaben und typische Merkmale aus dem Bereich der natürlichsprachlichen Generierung mit domänenspezifischen Informationen angereichert, um natürlichsprachliche Beschreibungen zu generieren. Das Konzept wird prototypisch implementiert und in einem Beispielszenario validiert

Surface realization architecture for low-resourced African languages

There has been growing interest in building surface realization systems to support the automatic generation of text in African languages. Such tools focus on converting abstract representations of meaning to text. Since African languages are low-resourced, economical use of resources and general maintainability are key considerations. However, there is no existing surface realizer architecture that possesses most of the maintainability characteristics (e.g., modularity, reusability, and analyzability) that will lead to maintainable software that can be used for the languages. Moreover, there is no consensus surface realization architecture created for other languages that can be adapted for the languages in question. In this work, we solve this by creating a novel surface realizer architecture suitable for low-resourced African languages that abide by the features of maintainable software. Its design comes after a granular analysis, classification, and comparison of the architectures used by 77 existing NLG systems. We compare our architecture to existing architectures and show that it supports the most features of a maintainable software product.Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Engineering through the HPI Research School at UCT and the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africahttps://dl.acm.org/journal/tallipInformatic

Application of fuzzy sets in data-to-text system

This PhD dissertation addresses the convergence of two distinct paradigms: fuzzy sets and natural language generation. The object of study is the integration of fuzzy set-derived techniques that model imprecision and uncertainty in human language into systems that generate textual information from numeric data, commonly known as data-to-text systems. This dissertation covers an extensive state of the art review, potential convergence points, two real data-to-text applications that integrate fuzzy sets (in the meteorology and learning analytics domains), and a model that encompasses the most relevant elements in the linguistic description of data discipline and provides a framework for building and integrating fuzzy set-based approaches into natural language generation/data-to-ext systems