Cognitive Support for the Organization of Writing

This paper describes a novel framework and a system to support writing professional documents. Our framework focuses on aiding the process of organizing ideas and constructing logical connections between text chunks in formal documents. Most previous approaches dealing with these issues have utilized one of three types of representations: a tree, a map, and a network. However, they all have their strengths and weaknesses. The tree is superior in helping the writers to grasp the hierarchical structure of a document, but it is difficult to express vague relationships among parts of a document. The map is easy to operate, but it restricts freedom in spatial organization. The network has flexibility to express what writers want, but it requires additional graphical objects to specify relationships among parts and it cannot be naturally transformed into a linear document. In our approach, the tree and the map are integrated: the local structure of a document is defined by the map while the global structure of the document is defined by the tree. Combining both representations has the following advantages: (1) it leverages the benefits of both representations, (2) it seamlessly supports both top-down organization and bottom-up organization, and (3) it smoothly supports writing from an ill-organized state to a well-organized state. Based on the proposed framework, we have built a system called iWeaver. We describe experiments in which six users wrote six technical documents using the system. The results show that our framework is an effective aid for constructing long, structured documents.