  This paper describes a prototype system to visualize and animate 3D scenes
from car accident reports, written in French. The problem of generating such a
3D simulation can be divided into two subtasks: the linguistic analysis and the
virtual scene generation. As a means of communication between these two
modules, we first designed a template formalism to represent a written accident
report. The CarSim system first processes written reports, gathers relevant
information, and converts it into a formal description. Then, it creates the
corresponding 3D scene and animates the vehicles.
