Publication Abstract Title Generation by selection and repair as a method for adapting text for the individual reader Authors Chrysanne DiMarco, Graeme Hirst, and Eduard Hovy Abstract A recent and growing development in Web applications has been the advent of various tools that claim to ``customize'' access to information on the Web by allowing users to specify the kinds of information they want to receive without having to search for it or sift through masses of irrelevant material. But this kind of customization is really just a crude filtering of raw Web material in which the user simply selects the ``channels'' of information she wishes to receive. Adaptive-hypertext presentation comes closer to achieving true document tailoring, but the current techniques used for adapting the content of a Web document to a particular user generally only involve some form of selectively showing (or hiding) portions of text or choosing whole variants of larger parts of the document. If the Web document designer wishes to write and present material in a way that will communicate well with the user, then just displaying the most relevant chunks of information will not be sufficient. For effective communication, both the form and content of the language used in a document should be tailored in rhetorically significant ways to best suit a user's particular personal characteristics and preferences. As a first step in this direction, we have been investigating applications of our earlier work on pragmatics in natural language processing to building systems for the automated generation of Web documents adapted for the individual reader. Full paper Postscript 6.8 mb