Publication Abstract Title HealthDoc: Customizing patient information and health education by medical condition and personal characteristics Authors Chrysanne DiMarco, Graeme Hirst, Leo Wanner, and John Wilkinson Abstract The HealthDoc project aims to provide a comprehensive approach to the customization of patient-information and health-education materials through the development of sophisticated natural language generation systems. We adopt a model of patient education that takes into account patient information ranging from simple medical data to complex cultural beliefs, so that our work provides both an impetus and a testbed for research in multicultural health communication. We propose a model of language generation, 'generation by selection and repair', that relies on a 'master-document' representation that pre-determines the basic form and content of a text, yet is amenable to editing and revision for customization. The implementation of this model has so far led to the design of a sentence planner that integrates multiple complex planning tasks and a rich set of ontological and linguistic knowledge sources. Full paper Postscript 143 k