Abstract: The paper reports the main results and conclusions of the analysis of eight dialogues between an expert and eight novice users of Word. The analysis of the expert’s requests for contextual information together with her explicit references to, and implicit use of the various types of contexts indicate that the types of contextual information she exploits most are the progress of the current task execution, the software current state and the novice’s current intention. Her help strategy, which differs greatly from standard didactic computer aided instruction approaches, encourages novices to adopt a “learning by doing ” strategy through helping them to achieve the tasks which motivate their use of the software. This strategy relies mostly, for defining the informational content of help messages, on the short-term context and on a dynamic model of the novice’s activities and goals, rather than on an individual (dynamic) or generic (static) cognitive user model. 1. Context, motivations and objectives Online help to the use of standard application software intended for the general public is still highly unsatisfactory. Despite the continuous efforts of researchers and designers over the last twenty years, most novice users still prefer consulting experienced users to browsing available online help or paper user guides. In addition, specific training sessions and tutorials are still very popular among novices nowadays. Since the beginning of the eighties, research has been developing along two parallel directions. One approach, which

In this paper, I provide desiderata for an interface that would enable ordinary people to properly access the capabilities of the NII. I identify some of the technologies that will be needed to achieve these desiderata, and discuss current and future research directions that could lead to the development of such technologies. In particular, I focus on the ways in which theory and techniques from natural language processing could contribute to future interfaces to the NII. Introduction The evolving national information infrastructure (NII) has made available a vast array of on-line services and networked information resources in a variety of forms (text, speech, graphics, images, video). At the same time, advances in computing and telecommunications technology have made it possible for an increasing number of households to own (or lease or use) powerful personal computers that are connected to this resource. Accompanying this progress is the expectation that people will be able to more...

The aim of the paper is to fill the gap between theory and practice in the production of explanations by a system. One reason of this gap arises from the fact that a problem is often solved thanks to a cooperation between the user and the system, and both participants in the cooperation need explanations. Explanations essentially depend on the context in which the user and the system interact. Such contextualized explanations are the result of a process and constitute a medium of communication between the user and the system during the problem solving. We focus on the need to make the context notion explicit in the explanation process. We analyze explanation and context in term of chunks of knowledge. Then we point out what the contribution of the context to explanation is. An example, which is drawn from a real application, introduces what the problem is.

l'utilisation des logiciels grand public sont rarement consultées par les utilisateurs novices. Pourtant, si les recherches sur l'aide en ligne suscitent moins d'intérêt depuis quelques années, les systèmes d'aide à l'utilisation des logiciels grand public commercialisés ont évolué considérablement au cours des vingt dernières années. Ce chapitre prend d'abord position en faveur de la nécessité d'une assistance en ligne à l'utilisation d'un nouveau logiciel, dans le débat de fond qui divise la communauté scientifique en interaction homme-machine sur la question fondamentale suivante: les aides en ligne sontelles un pis-aller, un simple remède aux défauts actuels de conception des logiciels et des interfaces utilisateur, ou bien sont-elles une assistance d'une nécessité absolue pour acquérir la maîtrise de l'utilisation d'un nouveau logiciel? La discussion s'appuie à la fois sur les résultats d'études empiriques ou expérimentales et sur des arguments théoriques. La seconde partie analyse les obstacles et les difficultés spécifiques auxquels se heurte la conception d'aides en ligne à l'intention du grand public, afin de comprendre pourquoi les aides en ligne sont ignorées des utilisateurs en dépit de leur nécessité. Dans la dernière partie, les contributions potentielles de diverses approches à la résolution de

In this paper we discuss an envisioned text planner for a computer-assisted instruction tool for deaf learners of English. We describe the problem of deaf literacy and overview our system, designed to act as a writing tutor that generates text to explain the errors found in a user's written compositions. These explanations are created according to a response anatomy that divides the planning task into a bottom-up phase for grouping and ordering explanations and a top-down phase for building a hierarchical text plan to create the explanatory text. This is then followed by a revision of the complete plan to place it in its greater context. At all levels of planning, the explanation is personalized to the individual learner's styles and knowledge in order to maximize the learning experience. Introduction The problem of deaf literacy has been well-documented and has far reaching effects on every aspect of deaf students ' education. Although data on writing skills is difficult to obtain, ...

Introduction: Computer-based Patient Education The importance of providing the public with more information about health issues is widely accepted. Indeed, recent studies have shown that, by providing asthma patients with personalised booklets about their condition, hospital admissions were reduced by 54% [OAB + 94]. One way of improving patient education is to provide computer-based access points where patients can browse through information screens explaining medical concepts. It has been demonstrated that such systems, if carefully designed, are considered helpful by patients [JNM93]. One good starting point for such systems is the patient's medical record. It is now a legal requirement (in the UK at least) that doctors provide patients with access to their records. Where such records are computerised this can be conveniently provided (given a suitable interface) through the computer. Access to records can further provide a motivating starting point for an ex

A current trend in medicine involves establishing collaborative problem solving between patients and physicians in order to involve patients more in their own care. Neither diagnosis nor therapy can be completely successful unless the patient and the doctor understand each other and collaborate with each other in an effort to gauge the other’s requests, needs and concerns. This is made even more difficult by the fact that there is often a big difference between the doctors and patients in terms of expectations, vocabulary used, and other factors. For diagnosis of many disorders, a detailed description of the problem and of the patient’s history are required. For therapy, patients must understand how and when to take prescribed drugs, what changes to make in diet, exercise, or lifestyle—and why they are important. This paper describes a model of asynchronous collaboration between people with very different knowledge of medicine in which a computer framework attempts to mediate between patients and physicians and reduce some of the differences in communication. It allows patients to pace themselves in familiarizing themselves with the relevant domain terms, some of the medical factors underlying the conditions under question, and the

Good communication is vital in healthcare, both among healthcare professionals, and between healthcare professionals and their patients. And well-written documents, describing and/or explaining the information in structured databases may be easier to comprehend, more edifying and even more convincing, than the structured data, even when presented in tabular or graphic form. Documents may be automatically generated from structured data, using techniques from the field of natural language generation. These techniques are concerned with how the content, organisation and language used in a document can be dynamically selected, depending on the audience and context. They have been used to generate health education materials, explanations and critiques in decision support systems, and medical reports and progress notes. Key words: natural language processing, communication, information systems, applications of medical informatics. Reprint requests and communication should be sent to: