how to interface to advisory systems? users request help with a very simple language
Advisory systems can be very powerful general tools for users. Formal query languages, menus, and direct manipulation interfaces might not suffice to access advisory systems' full functionality. The capabilities of natural language interfaces could be required. Unfortunately, natural language interfaces are not meeting the needs yet. Wide syntactic coverage is often traded off against handling ungrammatical sentences. However, this study shows that users request help with a very simple and restricted English, characteristic of unplanned or of child language . Moreover, users' utterances are frequently ungrammatical. It is argued that the simple syntax and the ungrammaticalities are determined by features intrinsic to advisory systems: users request help by typing to perform another primary task under real-time production constraints. Because of intrinsic performance constraints, users naturally resort to earlier and simpler forms of syntax. Natural language interfaces to advisory systems need not cover a wide variety of syntactic constructions but they must emphasize robust parsing.
interfaces systems users help language general tools formalism query languages direct manipulating access functional capabilities natural language meeting coverage feature performance task real-time product constraint robust parsing