Integrating Text Plans for Conciseness and Coherence

Our experience with a critiquing system shows that when the system detects problems with the user's performance, multiple critiques are often produced. Analysis of a corpus of actual critiques revealed that even though each individual critique is concise and coherent, the set of critiques as a whole may exhibit several problems that detract from conciseness and coherence, and consequently assimilation. Thus a text planner was needed that could integrate the text plans for individual communicative goals to produce an overall text plan representing a concise, coherent message. This paper presents our general rule-based system for accomplishing this task. The system takes as input a \emph{set} of individual text plans represented as RST-style trees, and produces a smaller set of more complex trees representing integrated messages that still achieve the multiple communicative goals of the individual text plans. Domain-independent rules are used to capture strategies across domains, while the facility for addition of domain-dependent rules enables the system to be tuned to the requirements of a particular domain. The system has been tested on a corpus of critiques in the domain of trauma care.