The thesis presented here describes original research in the field of Natural Language Generation (NLG). NLG is the subfield of artificial intelligence that is concerned with the automatic production of documents from underlying data. This thesis in particular focuses on developing new and novel methods for generating text that takes into consideration the recipient’s level of stress as a factor to adapt the resultant textural output. This consideration of taking the recipient level of stress was particularly salient due to the domain that this research was conducted under; providing information for parents of pre-term infants during neonatal intensive care (NICU). A highly technical and stressful environment for parents where emotional sensitivity must be shown for the nature of information presented. We have investigated the emotional and informational needs of these parents through an extensive past literature review and two separate research studies with former and current NICU parents. The NLG system built for this research was called BabyTalk Family (BT-Family). A system that can produce a textual summary of medical events that has occurred for a baby in NICU in last twenty-four hours for parents. The novelty of this system is that is capable of estimating the level of stress of the recipient and by using several affective NLG strategies it is able to tailor it’s output for a stressed audience. Unlike traditional NLG systems where the output would remain unchanged regardless of emotional state of the recipient. The key innovation in this system was the integration of several affective strategies in the Document Planner for tailoring textual output for stress recipients. BT-Family’s output was evaluated with thirteen parents that previously had baby in neonatal care. We developed a methodology for an evaluation that involved a direct comparison between stressed and unstressed text for the same given medical scenario for variables such as preference, understandability, helpfulness, and emotional appropriateness. The results, obtained showed the parents overwhelming preferred the stressed text for all of the variables measured.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:531881 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Mahamood, Saad Ali |
| Publisher | University of Aberdeen |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://digitool.abdn.ac.uk:80/webclient/DeliveryManager?pid=158569 |
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