Narratives to preserve coherence in collaborative writing

Overview & Synopsis

During collaborative writing, shared documents are replicated on geographically distant sites. Each user works on an individual copy. This results in divergent copies. Merging techniques such as those proposed by the Operational Transformation (OT) approach reconcile the differences among the replicas and ensure their convergence. Although the merging techniques resolve conflicting syntax, they do not help preserve coherence which is an important aspect of an effective document. Therefore, we investigate the use of ideas from narrative-based writing to improve the coherence of the document during collaborative editing. Narrativebased writing is a new technique for planning documents that enhances the implicit story conveyed by a document to the readers; thereby improving coherence. This paper presents a discussion of this investigation.