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An analysis of scripts generated in writing between users and computer consultants

Published: 09 July 1984 Publication History

Abstract

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.

References

[1]
Wilensky, R., Y. Arens, and D. N. Chin. "Talking to UNIX in English: An Overview of UC." To appear in the Communications of the ACM, June 1984.
[2]
Wilensky, R. "Talking to UNIX in English: An Overview of UC." In the Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. 1982.
[3]
Arens, Y. "The Context Model: Language Understanding in Context." In the Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. 1982.
[4]
Chin, D. N. "Knowledge Structures in UC, the UNIX Consultant." In the Proceedings of the 21st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 1983.
[5]
Jacobs, P. "Generation in a Natural Language Interface." In the Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. 1983.
[6]
Faletti, J. "PANDORA---A Program for Doing Commonsense Planning in Complex Situations." In the Proceedings of the Second Annual National Artificial Intelligence Conference. 1982.
[7]
Lindsay, P., and D. Norman. Human Information Processing: An Introduction to Psychology. New York: Academic Press, 1972.
[8]
Lewis, C., and R. Mack. "Learning to Use a Text Processing System: Evidence from 'Thinking Aloud' Protocols." In the Proceedings of the Human Factors in Computer Systems Conference. 1982.
[9]
Card, S. K., T. P. Moran, and A. Newell. The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction (1st ed.). Hillsdale, N. J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 1983.

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  • (2012)A few cognitive issues in multimedia language teachingASp10.4000/asp.4131(17-32)Online publication date: 20-Nov-2012
  • (2009)Towards Enhanced Usability of Natural Language Interfaces to Knowledge BasesWeb 2.0 & Semantic Web10.1007/978-1-4419-1219-0_5(105-133)Online publication date: 3-Nov-2009
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cover image ACM Other conferences
AFIPS '84: Proceedings of the July 9-12, 1984, national computer conference and exposition
July 1984
746 pages
ISBN:0882830430
DOI:10.1145/1499310
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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  • AFIPS: American Federation of Information Processing Societies

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 09 July 1984

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Cited By

View all
  • (2016)Self-service Ad-hoc Querying Using Controlled Natural LanguageDatabases and Information Systems10.1007/978-3-319-40180-5_2(18-34)Online publication date: 21-Jun-2016
  • (2012)A few cognitive issues in multimedia language teachingASp10.4000/asp.4131(17-32)Online publication date: 20-Nov-2012
  • (2009)Towards Enhanced Usability of Natural Language Interfaces to Knowledge BasesWeb 2.0 & Semantic Web10.1007/978-1-4419-1219-0_5(105-133)Online publication date: 3-Nov-2009
  • (1991)Users request help from advisory systems with simple and restricted languageHuman-Computer Interaction10.1207/s15327051hci0601_26:1(47-75)Online publication date: 1-Mar-1991
  • (1988)How to interface to advisory systems? Users request help with a very simple languageProceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/57167.57199(191-196)Online publication date: 1-May-1988
  • (1984)Talking to UNIX in EnglishCommunications of the ACM10.1145/358080.35810127:6(574-593)Online publication date: 1-Jun-1984

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