Synthesizing weather forecasts from formated data

Abstract

This paper describes a system (RAREAS) which synthesizes marine weather forecasts directly from formatted weather data. Such synthesis appears feasible in certain natural sublanguages with stereotyped text structure. RAREAS draws on several kinds of linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge and mirrors a forecaster's apparent tendency to ascribe less precise temporal adverbs to more remote meterological events. The approach can easily be adapted to synthesize bilingual or multi-lingual texts.