<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="P98-1084">
  <Title>Integrating Text Plans for Conciseness and Coherence*</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="512" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
2 Motivation
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> TraumAID (Webber et al., 1992) is a decision support system for addressing the initial definitive management of multiple trauma. TraumaTIQ (Gertner and Webber, 1996) is a module that infers a physician's plan for managing patient care, compares it to TraumAID's plan, and critiques significant differences between them.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> TraumaTIQ recognizes four classes of differences: errors of omission, errors of commission, scheduling errors, and procedure choice errors.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Experimentation with TraumaTIQ showed that when the physician's plan is deficient, several problems are generally detected, and thus multiple critiques are independently produced.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3">  We analyzed 5361 individual critiques comprising 753 critique sets produced by TraumaTIQ on actual cases of trauma care. A critique set represents the critiques that are produced at a particular point in a case. While each critique was coherent and concise in isolation, we found several problems within critique sets: some critiques detracted from others in the critique set; some would make more sense if they took explicit account of other critiques appearing earlier in the set; and there was informational overlap among critiques.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Our analysis revealed 22 common patterns of inter-related critiques, each pattern covering some subset of a critique set. While we initially developed a domain-dependent system, TraumaGEN, that operated directly on the logical form of the critiques produced by TraumaTIQ, we noted that many of the patterns were more generally applicable, and that the problems we were addressing would also arise in other sophisticated systems that distribute their processing across multiple independent modules, each of which may need to communicate with the user.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> While such systems could be designed to try to prevent problems of this kind from arising, the result would be less modular, more complex, and more difficult to extend.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> Thus we developed RTPI, a system for constructing a set of integrated RST-style text plans from a set of individual text plans. RTPI contains a set of domain-independent rules, along with adjustable parameters that determine when and how rules are invoked. In addition, RTPI allows the addition of domain-dependent rules, so the system can account for interactions and strategies particular to a domain. null</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>