Structural variation in generated health reports

We present a natural language generator that produces a range of medical reports on the clinical histories of cancer patients, and discuss the problem of conceptual restatement in generating various textual views of the same conceptual content. We focus on two features of our system: the demand for “loose paraphrases” between the various reports on a given patient, with a high degree of semantic overlap but some necessary amount of distinctive content; and the requirement for paraphrasing at primarily the discourse level.