Abstract for Automated Drafting of Self-Explaining Documents
6th International Conference on AI and Law, 1997

      The capacity for self-explanation can make computer-drafted documents more credible, assist in the retrieval and adaptation of archival documents, and permit comparison of documents at a deep level. We propose a knowledge-based model of documents that makes explicit the underlying goals that documents are intended to achieve and the stylistic conventions to which they must conform. These goals and conventions are expressed in a dual justification structure that represents the illocutionary and rhetorical dependencies underlying documents. After demonstrating how a document grammar derived from dual justification structures can be used to automate document drafting, we show how documents can exploit dual justification structures to ``explain themselves'' by answering queries about (1) the purposes for inclusion of text in the document and (2) the justification for propositions expressed in the text. This self-explanation framework has been implemented in the Docu-Planner, a prototype document generation system that produces ``queryable'' documents.




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