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Programs as data for their help systems

Published: 07 June 1982 Publication History

Abstract

The goal of this research is to develop ways of representing the knowledge available to a help system in such a way that the system can actually reason with the knowledge rather than being restricted to simply retrieving and presenting stored answers to a restricted and anticipated class of questions. One kind of information that is useful to such an intelligent help system is knowledge of how the underlying system operates. This knowledge is contained in the code for the system. By exploiting system code as part of the help database, many problems of inconsistency between programs and their documentation can be avoided. In our initial investigations of this problem, we are representing the system code as a set of productions that are easier to manipulate than is code in most standard languages. As we develop techniques for answering questions by reasoning with knowledge about the system, we become increasingly able to answer the growing variety of questions that will occur as the language interface to a help system becomes more flexible.

References

[1]
Grice, H. P. "Logic and Conversation." In P. Cole & J. L. Morgan (eds.), Studies in Syntax, Volume III. New York: Seminar Press, 1975.
[2]
Reid, Brian. "Scribe: A Document Specification Language and Its Compiler." Ph.D. thesis, Carnegie-Mellon University, 1980.

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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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  • (2007)The answer is in the question: a protocol study of intelligent helpBehaviour & Information Technology10.1080/014492987089018516:4(393-402)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2007
  • (1994)Automatic generation of textual, audio, and animated help in UIDEProceedings of the workshop on Advanced visual interfaces10.1145/192309.192322(44-52)Online publication date: 1-Jun-1994
  • (1989)User Models in Dialog SystemsUser Models in Dialog Systems10.1007/978-3-642-83230-7_1(4-34)Online publication date: 1989
  • (1987)Using the User's Intelligence to Design Intelligent InterfacesProceedings of the Human Factors Society Annual Meeting10.1177/15419312870310030231:3(281-284)Online publication date: 1-Sep-1987
  • (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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