How to interface to advisory systems? Users request help with a very simple language
CHI '88 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
An iterative design methodology for user-friendly natural language office information applications
ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS)
Optimization criteria for checkpoint placement
Communications of the ACM
Usable natural language interfaces through menu-based natural language understanding
CHI '83 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
The effects of limited grammar on interactive natural language
CHI '83 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
The pragmatics of referring and the modality of communication
Computational Linguistics
Recovery strategies for parsing extragrammatical language
Computational Linguistics - Special issue on ill-formed input
The structure of user-adviser dialogues: is there method in their madness?
ACL '86 Proceedings of the 24th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
ACL '87 Proceedings of the 25th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
Anaphora resolution: short-term memory and focusing
ACL '85 Proceedings of the 23rd annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
Dependencies of discourse structure on the modality of communication: telephone vs. teletype
ACL '82 Proceedings of the 20th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
Linguistic analysis of natural language communication with computers
COLING '80 Proceedings of the 8th conference on Computational linguistics
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
In this descriptive and exploratory study, 32 users type help requests to what they believe is a computerized advisor. In fact, the advisor is a human mimicking realistic levels of intelligence and knowledge that can be expected from a computerized advisor. Results show that users request help with a very simple and restricted language that is characteristic of language generated under real-time production constraints and of child language. Moreover, users' utterances are frequently ungrammatical. It is hypothesized that these features arise from factors intrinsic to typed advisory situations: Users are performing a primary task under real-time constraints, and typing help requests is a secondary task. On the other hand, users refer to objects and events with very precise descriptions instead of faster-to-type pronouns; they produce very few ellipses and deictic expressions. Future research should elucidate whether shared context between users and computerized advisors needs to be richer than created in this study to sustain the use of expressions whose interpretations depend on context. The tuning of natural language interfaces to the features observed in this study may increase the usefulness of natural language interfaces to advisory systems. The presented methodology is a promising tool for further studies of these factors on users' language.