A section title authoring tool for clinical guidelines

Abstract

Professional users of medical information often report difficulties when attempting to locate specific information in lengthy documents. Sometimes these difficulties can be attributed to poorly specified section titles which fail to advertise relevant content. In this paper we describe preliminary work on a software plug-in for a document engineering environment that will assist authors when they formulate section-level headings. We describe two different algorithms which can be used to generate section titles. We compare the performance of these algorithms and correlate our experimental results with an evaluation of title quality performed by domain experts.