Content analysis of technical documentation for authoring support

Authoring technical documentation of products is a time-consuming process for industry. Furthermore,products are typically not designed in isolation, but belong to product lines, in which different products sharefeatures and operating instructions. Therefore, authoring technical documentation should be enabled to buildon existing documentation components that are retrieved and adapted to different, but similar, products.Innovatia is an industry leader in supporting companies re-use and deploy in electronic form existingdocumentation materials. The proposed project will investigate the application of text mining and textvisualization techniques to the problem of management and re-use of technical documentation. Different textsimilarity methods will be applied, aiming to improve the ability of Innovatia's authoring system to identify andcluster together similar document components, even if they use different wording to express similar concepts.