Talking to UNIX in English: an overview of UC
Communications of the ACM
The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction
The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction
Learning to use a text processing system: Evidence from “thinking aloud” protocols
CHI '82 Proceedings of the 1982 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Knowledge structures in UC, the UNIX Consultant
ACL '83 Proceedings of the 21st annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
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
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The scripts generated in written interactive communications between users and a computer consultant program were investigated in a controlled experiment. The program was a simulation of UC, the UNIX Consultant, which users believed to be the actual program. An analysis of the scripts generated while solving a predefined set of problems showed the heavy use of context in forms such as ellipsis, anaphora, indirect speech acts, and grammatically incomplete sentences in over one-quarter of input clauses. Also present were grammatically ill-formed constructions and spelling errors. A comparison with a control group of users solving the same problem set with human consultants showed that the control group relied on context about twice as much as the simulation group. This suggests that people naturally use context in language and that the simulation group tried to rely less on context because they believed that they were speaking to a computer. Even so, contextual information is essential to understanding a large part of the simulation group's input.