  Natural-language generation (NLG) techniques can be used to automatically
produce technical documentation from a domain knowledge base and linguistic and
contextual models. We discuss this application of NLG technology from both a
technical and a usefulness (costs and benefits) perspective. This discussion is
based largely on our experiences with the IDAS documentation-generation
project, and the reactions various interested people from industry have had to
IDAS. We hope that this summary of our experiences with IDAS and the lessons we
have learned from it will be beneficial for other researchers who wish to build
technical-documentation generation systems.
