DOCUMENT GENERATION APPARATUS AND METHODS

A document generation system which employs a definition-based expert system and an editor to produce an output document from a template document and expert system responses. The knowledge base of the expert system consists of a hierarchy of terms and their definitions. To produce an expert response, an inference engine component of the expert system evaluates a term by evaluating all of the definitions for the terms which are in that term's hierarchy of definitions. In the document generation system, the terms include fragment terms which are defined as portions of the template document.