The EPISTLE text-critiquing system

The long-term objectives of the EPISTLE project are to provide office workers, particularly middle-level managers, with a variety of application packages to help them interact with natural language texts. Initially we are focusing on business letters and on the first of two classes of applications. This first class will provide services for the author, initially furnishing critiques of a draft of a letter or other text, and eventually helping him write an initial draft based on a terse statement of what he wants to say. The second class of applications will deal with incoming texts, synopsizing letter contents, highlighting portions known to be of interest, and automatically generating index terms based on conceptual or thematic characteristics rather than key words.