— Detailed and expressive e-learning specifications like IMS LD [1] are necessary to create efficient e-learning applications. E-learning specifications that meet these demands tend to be long and detailed such that authoring e-learning content becomes a tedious and error-prone endeavour. This paper describes DBAT-LD (Dialogue-Based Authoring of Learning Designs) which is a document generating dialogue system (DGDS) that interacts with authors of units of learning and secures the content of the dialogue in an XML-based target format. In the case of IMS LD, DBAT-LD elicits an IMS LD compliant description of learning activities along with pedagogical support activities [2] and delivers a Unit of Learning package. DBAT-LD offers a lot of support (explanations, control questions, adaptation to the user) to ease authoring while strictly following the specification of IMS LD.