Chrysanne DiMarco

Authoring and Generating Health-Education Documents That Are Tailored to the Needs of the Individual Patient

Health-education documents can be much more effective in achieving patient compliance if they are customized for individual readers. For this purpose, a medical record can be thought of as an extremely detailed user model of a reader of such a document. The HealthDoc project is developing methods for producing health-information and patient-education documents that are tailored to the individual personal and medical characteristics of the patients who receive them. Information from an on-line medical record or from a clinician will be used as the primary basis for deciding how best to fit the document to the patient. In this paper, we describe our research on three aspects of the project: the kinds of tailoring that are appropriate for health-education documents; the nature of a tailorable master document, and how it can be created; and the linguistic problems that arise when a tailored instance of the document is to be generated.

Stylistic Decision-Making in Natural Language Generation

A computational theory of syntactic style was incorporated at all levels of an existing natural language generation system, Penman, showing how a combination of top-down and opportunistic planning can be used to generate sentences that must satisfy specific stylistic goals. The low-level incorporation of the theory included making additions and modifications to the Nigel systemic grammar that allow the generation of sentence components to be controlled on the basis of stylistic, as well as syntactic, criteria. These modifications were tied to a high-level stylistic control mechanism. We show how this mechanism can make decisions between syntactic structures on the basis of stylistic considerations.

Toward an ontology of rhetorical figures

Our paper describes the Rhetorical Figure Ontology Project, a multidisciplinary research project that is presently working towards the development of a comprehensive database of rhetorical figures, an associated wiki, and, ultimately, an ontology of rhetorical figures. The database and wiki project provide the dataset and space for the conceptual development, respectively, to create an ontology. We define an ontology as a formalized taxonomy or system of classification of concepts and associated descriptions of said concepts. Here we provide an overview of the present state of the project and a discussion of the development of ontological descriptions of rhetorical figures. This work is a joint venture between Dr. Randy Allen Harris (English) and Dr. Chrysanne DiMarco (Computer Science, and English) at the University of Waterloo, Canada.

A model of comparative stylistics for machine translation

The study of comparative stylistics attempts to catalogue and explain the differences in style between languages. Rules of comparative stylistics are commonly presented in textbooks of translation as simple ‘rules of thumb’, but if we hope to incorporate a knowledge of comparative stylistics into machine translation systems, we must take a more systematic approach. We develop a formal model of comparative syntactic stylistics to be used as a component of a general computational theory of style. We adapt textbook rules of human translation and study a small corpus of French-English translations to determine how these informal rules can be represented in our model as formal rules of translation. Our model of comparative stylistics could be implemented in a machine translation system, enabling the system to make a more informed decision about possible translation choices and their potential stylistic effects.

Argumentative meanings and their stylistic configurations in clinical research publications

The paper reports on the results of an exploratory study into the topical organisation and stylistic features of argumentation in a corpus of ophthalmic clinical research papers. The study responds to the need for systematised and generalisable argumentation models in knowledge-intensive fields. We present here a schematised superstructure of the arguments from the corpus, charting the configurations of stylistic features, which signal the elements of this superstructure, epistemic topoi. We pay special attention to the role of lexical categories (or semantic fields) in the configurations, to the relations between the fields, and to their interactions with other elements of the configurations, including semantic, grammatical, syntagmatic, deictic, and coreferential features. Epistemic topoi are a promising discourse constituent in argumentation because, as we found, they are distinct from syntagmatic units, such as phrases, clauses, or argumentative zones, and because they are signalled with substantially...