TellMe: learning procedures from tutorial instruction

  • Authors:

  • Yolanda Gil;Varun Ratnakar;Christian Frtiz

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Southern California, Marina del Rey, CA, USA;University of Southern California, Marina del Rey, CA, USA;University of Southern California, Marina del Rey, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 16th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

This paper describes an approach to allow end users to define new procedures through tutorial instruction. Our approach allows users to specify procedures in natural language in the same way that they would instruct another person, while the system handles incompleteness and ambiguity inherent in natural human instruction and formulates follow up questions. We describe the key features of our approach, which include exposing prior knowledge, deductive and heuristic reasoning, shared learning state, and selectively asking questions to the user. We also describe how those key features are realized in our implemented TellMe system, and present preliminary user studies where non-programmers were able to easily specify complex multi-step procedures.