Analysis of communication of uncertainty in genetic counseling patient letters for design of a natural language generation system
Nancy L. Green · Social Semiotics · 2010
The GenIE (Genetics Information Expression) Assistant is a proof-of-concept computer system designed to assist healthcare providers by creating editable first drafts of genetic counseling patient letters. Due to the wide range of genetic conditions to be covered and the rapid growth of knowledge in genomic medicine, it would not be feasible to have human experts to pre-author all possible text that might be needed. Thus, our approach has been to develop techniques for natural language generation of patient letters. To gain insight for the design of the system, a corpus of genetic counseling patient letters was studied. This article describes the methods used to analyze expressions of uncertainty in the corpus, some results of that analysis, and its implications for natural language generation.