Generating Symbolic and Natural Language Partial Solutions for Inclusion in Medical Plans

摘要

We describe the generation of partial solutions to Prolog queries posed during the design of medical treatment plans. Given a set of Prolog encoded safety principles, the queries request advise on plan revisions to conform with safety requirements. The user unfolds queries interactively, navigating a path through the solution search space by interacting with natural language representations of the Prolog terms. In this way, both symbolic and natural language representations of partial solutions can be generated. The former can be included in the plan, and the latter exported to a protocol document describing the plan. Hence, useful and informative partial solutions are still obtained despite incompleteness of the underlying knowledge base, which ordinarily would mean failure of a query. Furthermore, the user can avoid being overwhelmed by surplus solutions, and unfold to levels of detail suitable for different plans and their accompanying protocols.