Rhetorical Structures in Medication Information for Patients and Physicians : A comparative study in preparation for text generation

Abstract: The healthcare domain contains a lot of information that could help patients understand and handle their situation, if it is presented in an understandable way. One way to assist healthcare professionals in this endeavour could be a text generation system that can handle a large amount of information and produce a text adapted to fit the knowledge and needs of the recipient. In order to construct such a system, the current methods for presenting and adapting texts in the healthcare domain need to be analysed and understood. In this study, Rhetorical Structure Theory is used, which is a framework that has often been applied within text generation to map out how texts are structured. The objective is to discern how texts containing medication information directed toward laymen are structured in comparison to similar texts directed toward healthcare professionals. It turns out that the texts directed toward laymen prompt and motivate the reader directly, while texts directed toward healthcare professionals at the utmost offer advice and generally provides more neutral, comprehensive information. The results indicate that Rhetorical Structure Theory can be used to find different intentions with texts directed toward different recipients, as well as how these intentions are mediated in the texts, in a structured way that appears to be useful for the text generation process.