Using MAS to determine the audience for engineering documents

Many books on preparing engineering documents tell us that the first and most important step is audience analysis. While we agree that audience analysis is important, do we have the appropriate tools and techniques for anlaysis? Surveys can be effective tools for audience analysis, but identifying the audience is a problem - not only because the audience can be drawn from a globalized and diversified society, but also because the audience often consists of people of different nationalities and cultural backgrounds. However, any attempt at audience identification is better than none. In this paper, I present a method to identify the audience using a multi-agent system (MAS) when preparing engineering documents.