Sheepdog: Learning Procedures for Technical Support

DMCA

Sheepdog: Learning Procedures for Technical Support (2004)

Cached

Download Links

Other Repositories/Bibliography

DBLP

by Tessa Lau , Lawrence Bergman , Vittorio Castelli , Daniel Oblinger

Venue:	IN PROCEEDINGS OF IUI 2004
Citations:	32 - 5 self

BibTeX

@INPROCEEDINGS{Lau04sheepdog:learning,
    author = {Tessa Lau and Lawrence Bergman and Vittorio Castelli and Daniel Oblinger},
    title = {Sheepdog: Learning Procedures for Technical Support},
    booktitle = {IN PROCEEDINGS OF IUI 2004},
    year = {2004},
    pages = {109--116},
    publisher = {}
}

OpenURL

Abstract

Technical support procedures are typically very complex. Users often have trouble following printed instructions describing how to perform these procedures, and these instructions are difficult for support personnel to author clearly. Our goal is to learn these procedures by demonstration, watching multiple experts performing the same procedure across different operating conditions, and produce an executable procedure that runs interactively on the user's desktop. Most previous programming by demonstration systems have focused on simple programs with regular structure, such as loops with fixed-length bodies. In contrast, our system induces complex procedure structure by aligning multiple execution traces covering different paths through the procedure. This paper presents a solution to this alignment problem using Input/Output Hidden Markov Models. We describe the results of a user study that examines how users follow printed directions. We present Sheepdog, an implemented system for capturing, learning, and playing back technical support procedures on the Windows desktop. Finally, we empirically evalute our system using traces gathered from the user study and show that we are able to achieve 73% accuracy on a network configuration task using a procedure trained by non-experts.

Keyphrases

learning procedure technical support technical support procedure user study simple program printed instruction complex procedure structure window desktop printed direction multiple expert present sheepdog multiple execution trace previous programming different operating condition support personnel regular structure fixed-length body different path executable procedure input output hidden markov model network configuration task implemented system alignment problem demonstration system

DMCA