TellMe: learning procedures from tutorial instruction

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. Author Keywords Natural instruction, tutorial instruction, procedure learning. ACM Classification Keywords H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI) General Terms Human Factors.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: IUI
• Authors: Yolanda Gil, Varun Ratnakar, Christian Fritz
• Keywords: Author Keywords, Information Interfaces, IUI 2011, Software Engineering, Tellme