The dynamic generation of hypertext presentations of medical guidelines

Abstract

We describe a project aimed at developing a tool to generate user and context-adapted textual descriptions of clinical guidelines on the World Wide Web. ARIANNA employs two knowledge sources (a decision tree and a taxonomy of concepts in the clinical domain) and schema and ATN-based NLG techniques, to dynamically generate the hypermedia. This appears to the user as a frameset with three main components: the guideline itself, an explanation of related concepts and a justification of individual steps. Each component is adapted to the user: i) the guideline is adapted to the user's goal in consulting the system (tutoring vs decision support); ii) explanations of concepts are adapted to the user knowledge and to the interaction history; iii) justifications are reserved for the tutoring consultation mode.