We present a study of the information transferred among caregivers in the context of cardiac surg... more We present a study of the information transferred among caregivers in the context of cardiac surgery and use the study to evaluate a system, MAGIC, that we are developing for automated generation of briefings. Our framework integrates cognitive and quantitative evaluation methods and features three standards that reflect current practice in the Cardiothoracic Intensive Care Unit (CTICU). Using experimental design to compare human-generated and machine-generated briefings, we show that MAGIC's current level of performance is useful. Moreover, MAGIC could help improve information flow in the CTICU by providing a consistent set of information earlier than in current practice. The separate standards are also consistent in suggesting specific modifications that may be necessary for iterative design and further system development.
Proceedings of the fifth conference on Applied natural language processing -, 1997
This paper identifies issues for language generation that arose in developing a multimedia interf... more This paper identifies issues for language generation that arose in developing a multimedia interface to healthcare data that includes coordinated speech, text and graphics. In order to produce brief speech for time-pressured caregivers, the system both combines related information into a single sentence and uses abbreviated references in speech when an unambiguous textual reference is also used. Finally, due to the temporal nature of the speech, the language generation module needs to communicate information about the ordering and duration of references to other temporal media, such as graphics, in order to allow for coordination between media.
Proceedings of the fourth ACM international conference on Multimedia - MULTIMEDIA '96, 1996
Creating high-quality multimedia presentations requires much skill, time, and effort. This is par... more Creating high-quality multimedia presentations requires much skill, time, and effort. This is particularly true when temporal media, such as speech and animation, are involved. We describe the design and implementation of a knowledge-based system that generates customized temporal multimedia presentations. We provide an overview of the system's architecture, and explain how speech, written text, and graphics are generated and coordinated. Our emphasis is on how temporal media are coordinated by the system through a multi-stage negotiation process. In negotiation, media-specific generation components interact with a novel coordination component that solves temporal constraints provided by the generators. We illustrate our work with a set of examples generated by the system in a testbed application intended to update hospital caregivers on the status of patients who have undergone a cardiac bypass operation.
Proceedings of the 17th international conference on Computational linguistics -, 1998
In this paper, we provide an account of how to generate sentences with coordination constructions... more In this paper, we provide an account of how to generate sentences with coordination constructions from clause-sized semantic representations. An algorithm is developed and various examples from linguistic literature will be used to demonstrate that the algorithm does its job well.
Proceedings of the 37th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics on Computational Linguistics -, 1999
We present a corpus-based study of the sequential ordering among premodifiers in noun phrases. Th... more We present a corpus-based study of the sequential ordering among premodifiers in noun phrases. This information is important for the fluency of generated text in practical applications. We propose and evaluate three approaches to identify sequential order among premodifiers: direct evidence, transitive closure, and clustering. Our implemented system can make over 94% of such ordering decisions correctly, as evaluated on a large, previously unseen test corpus.
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Papers by James Shaw