Publication Abstract Title Authoring and generating health-education documents that are tailored to the needs of the individual patient Authors Graeme Hirst, Chrysanne DiMarco, Eduard Hovy, and Kimberley Parsons Abstract 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. Full paper Postscript 325 k