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Natural-language help in the Consul system

Published: 07 June 1982 Publication History

Abstract

If we use the model of asking an expert, it is fairly clear what users want from a help system: a service that tells them how to do something they want to do. But current help systems aren't like this. They can tell the users about system capabilities, but not in relation to what they want to do. Most help systems are simply databases of online documentation---system manuals, not system experts. Like system manuals, using them to figure out how to do something or to figure out what went wrong is a last resort---when no one else is around.
Providing real expert help requires reasoning in terms of models of what the user wants to do and what the system can do. These models also make it possible to provide facilities for natural-language understanding and generation. Thus, users can deal with the system in much the same way that they deal with a human expert: by asking questions and receiving advice in English.
These ideas are being tested in the Consul system, a research prototype currently under development at the USC Information Sciences Institute.

References

[1]
Lingard, Robert. "A Software Methodology for Building Interactive Tools." Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Software Engineering, 1981.
[2]
Mark, William. "Representation and Inference in the Consul System." Proceedings of the Seventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI, 1981.
[3]
Relles, Nathan, and Lynne Price. "A User Interface for Online Assistance." Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Software Engineering, 1981.
[4]
Stotz, R., R. Tugender, D. Wilczynski, and D. Oestreicher. "SIGMA: An Interactive Message Service for the Military Message Experiment." AFIPS Proceedings of the National Computer Conference (Vol. 48), 1979.
[5]
Stotz, R., D. Wilczynski, S. Finkel, R. Lingard, D. Oestreicher, L. Richardson, and R. Tugender. SIGMA Final Report: Lessons. Information Sciences Institute, Technical Report ISI/RR-81-97, May 1981.
[6]
Wilczynski, David. "Knowledge Acquisition in the Consul System." Proceedings of the Seventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI, 1981.

Cited By

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  • (1987)A response generation mechanism for an intelligent active assistance systemProceedings of the 15th annual conference on Computer Science10.1145/322917.322937(128-132)Online publication date: 1-Feb-1987

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cover image ACM Other conferences
AFIPS '82: Proceedings of the June 7-10, 1982, national computer conference
June 1982
857 pages
ISBN:088283035X
DOI:10.1145/1500774
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: 07 June 1982

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  • (1987)A response generation mechanism for an intelligent active assistance systemProceedings of the 15th annual conference on Computer Science10.1145/322917.322937(128-132)Online publication date: 1-Feb-1987

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