Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How do people write letters? Examine the contents of any letter-writing handbook. People gain proficiency in this form of discourse through adaptation of examples (or at least there is a wide consensus that examples are an excellent way to teach good writing skills). LetterGen constructs letters in a similar manner: The programmer initially separates example letters into snippets, and provides a plan derivation for each snippet. During an interview with the user, LetterGen infers which snippets are relevant to the user's stated goals and beliefs by instantiating and adapting the stored derivations. Snippets are then ordered into a new, complete letter. Additionally, representing letters as a set of plan derivations has the consequence that translated versions of a letter do not require special treatment; the target language is treated as just one of many goals.