The HealthDoc project aims to provide a comprehensive approach to the customization of patient-information and health-education materials through the development of sophisticated natural language generation systems. We adopt a model of patient education that takes into account patient information ranging from simple medical data to complex cultural beliefs, so that our work provides both an impetus and testbed for research in multicultural health communication. We propose a model of language generation, `generation by selection and repair ', that relies on a `master-document' representation that pre-determines the basic form and content of a text, yet is amenable to editing and revision for customization. The implementation of this model has so far led to the design of a sentence planner that integrates multiple complex planning tasks and a rich set of ontological and linguistic knowledge sources. 1 Customizing patient-education material Present-day health-education and patient-infor...