NATURAL-LANGUAGE GENERATION IN HEALTH-CARE

Good communication is vital in health care, both among health care pro fessionals, and between health care professionals and their patients. And well-written documents, describing and/or explaining the informati on in structured databases may be easier to comprehend, more edifying, and even more convincing than the structured data, even when presente d in tabular or graphic form. Documents may be automatically generated from structured data, using techniques from the field of natural lang uage generation. These techniques are concerned with how the content, organization and language used in a document carl be dynamically selec ted, depending on the audience and context. They have been used to gen erate health education materials, explanations and critiques in decisi on support systems, and medical reports and progress notes.