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

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... 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.