skip to main content
article
Free Access

Information sought and information provided: an empirical study of user/expert dialogues

Authors Info & Claims
Published:01 April 1985Publication History
Skip Abstract Section

Abstract

Transcripts of computer-mail users seeking advice from an expert were studied to investigate the complementary claims that people often do not know what information they need to obtain in order to achieve their goals, and consequently, that experts must identify inappropriate queries and infer and respond to the goals behind them. This paper reports on one facet of the transcript analysis, namely, the identification of the types of relation that hold between the action that an advice-seeker asks about and the action that an expert tells him how to perform. Three such relations between actions are identified: generates, enables, and is-alternative-to. The claim is made that a cooperative advice-providing system, such as a help system or an expert system, must be able to compute these relations between actions.

References

  1. 1 Allen, James F. and C. Raymond Perrault. Analyzing Intention in Utterances. Artificial Intelligence 15:143-178, 1980.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  2. 2 Carberry, Sandra. Tracking User Goals in an Information-Seeking Environment. In Proceedings of the Third National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. 1983.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  3. 3 Goldman, Alvin i. A Theory of Human Action. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1970.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  4. 4 Litman, Diane and James Mlen. A Plan Recognition Model .for Subdialogues in Conversation. Technical Report TR 141, University of Rochester, 1984.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  5. 5 Pollack, Martha E. Goal Inference in Expert Systems. Technical Report MS-CIS-84-07, University of Pennsylvania, 1984. Doctoral dissertation proposal.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  6. 6 Pollack, Martha E. Toward a More Expressive Model of Plans. 1985. Submitted to IJCAI-85.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  7. 7 Sidner, Constance L. What the speaker means: the recognition of speakers' plans in discourse. International Journal of Computers and Mathematics 9:71-82, 1983.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  8. 8 Wilensky, Robert, Yigal Arens, and David Chin. Talking to UNIX in English: An Overview of UC. Communications of the ACM 27:574-593, 1984. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library

Index Terms

  1. Information sought and information provided: an empirical study of user/expert dialogues

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Login options

    Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

    Sign in

    Full Access

    • Published in

      cover image ACM SIGCHI Bulletin
      ACM SIGCHI Bulletin  Volume 16, Issue 4
      April 1985
      201 pages
      ISSN:0736-6906
      DOI:10.1145/1165385
      Issue’s Table of Contents
      • cover image ACM Conferences
        CHI '85: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
        April 1985
        231 pages
        ISBN:0897911490
        DOI:10.1145/317456

      Copyright © 1985 ACM

      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]

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      • Published: 1 April 1985

      Check for updates

      Qualifiers

      • article

    PDF Format

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader