An Evaluation of Procedural Instructional Text
Published 1 July 2002
Nathalie Colineau, Cécile Paris, Keith Vander Linden
Citations16
Generate an AI Snapshot to get a quick, structured summary of this paper.
Study Snapshot
ObjectiveStudy objective
MethodsResearch methodology
PopulationPopulation studied
Sample sizeSample sizes
OutcomesStudy outcomes here
ResultsStudy results comes here
LimitationsResearch study limitations comes here
A concise AI-generated summary of the paper will appear here once you click Generate AI Snapshot.
TL;DR
An evaluation of the instructional text generated by Isolde, an authoring tool for technical writers that automates the production of procedural on-line help, suggests that the documentation produced by ISolde is of comparable quality to similar texts found in commercial manuals.
Abstract
This paper presents an evaluation of the instructional text generated by Isolde, an authoring tool for technical writers that automates the production of procedural on-line help. The evaluation compares the effectiveness of the instructional text produced by Isolde with that of professionally authored instructions, such as MS Word Help. The results suggest that the documentation produced by Isolde is of comparable quality to similar texts found in commercial manuals.
Keywords
Social SciencesComputer Science
The Handbook of Task Analysis for Human-Computer Interaction
603 Citations2003
The Nurnberg funnel: designing minimalist instruction for practical computer skill
585 Citations1990John M. Carroll
Edinburgh Research Explorer (University of Edinburgh)Planning text for advisory dialogues: capturing intentional and rhetorical information
336 Citations1993Johanna D. Moore, Cécile Paris
It is argued that, to handle explanation dialogues successfully, a discourse model must include information about the intended effect of individual parts of the text on the hearer, as well as how the parts relate to one another rhetorically.
Natural Language EngineeringEnabling technology for multilingual natural language generation: the <scp>KPML</scp> development environment
192 Citations1997John Bateman
KPML aims to provide generation projects with standardized, broad-coverage, reusable resources and a basic engine for using such resources for generation, based on a new, generic approach to multilinguality in resource description that extends significantly beyond previous approaches.
Developing and empirically evaluating robust explanation generators: the KNIGHT experiments
84 Citations1997James C. Lester, Bruce Porter
This paper describes KNIGHT, a robust explanation system that constructs multisentential and multi-paragraph explanations from the Biology Knowledge Base, a large-scale knowledge base in the domain of botanical anatomy, physiology, and development, and introduces the Two-Panel evaluation methodology.
What You See Is What You Meant: direct knowledge editing with natural language feedback
77 Citations1998Richard Power, Donia Scott +1 more
WYSIWYM editing is an alternative solution in which the texts to view and edit the knowledge are generated not by the user but by the system, and each choice directly updates the knowledge base.
The DIANE+ Method
63 Citations1996Jean-Claude Tarby, Marie-France Barthet
The DIANE+ extends the DIANE method to make possible the automatic generation of user interface, and concerns the model of dialogue control, and the integration of an OPAC object data model extending the PAC model.
Artificial IntelligenceUsing Grice's maxim of Quantity to select the content of plan descriptions
59 Citations1999R. Michael Young
The Cooperative Plan Identification (CPI) architecture is presented, a computational model that generates concise, effective textual descriptions of plans that speakers and hearers cooperate with one another in their communication about a plan.
ComputerAn interactive support tool for writing multilingual manuals
31 Citations1996Cécile Paris, Keith Vander Linden
Drafter is an interactive document drafting tool that can be integrated into the technical writers' working practices and that can automatically and simultaneously generate appropriately worded drafts in several languages.
Using a randomised controlled clinical trial to evaluate an NLG system
22 Citations2001Ehud Reiter, Roma Robertson +2 more
The STOP system, which generates personalised smoking-cessation letters, was evaluated by a randomised controlled clinical trial, which is believed to be the largest and perhaps most rigorous task effectiveness evaluation ever performed on an NLG system.
Informatik aktuellTECHDOC: A System for the Automatic Production of Multilingual Technical Documents
14 Citations1992Dietmar Rösner, Manfred Stede
This work focused on multilingual automobile manuals, specifically maintenance instructions, and analyzed them in terms of underlying technical knowledge and text structure, leading to a design of a system for the automatic, multilingual generation of such maintenance manuals.
Content and rhetorical status selection in instructional texts
13 Citations1994Leila Kosseim, Guy Lapalme
The approach taken starts from an AI task planner building a task representation, from which semantic carriers are selected, and the most appropriate RST relations to communicate these carriers are chosen according to heuristics developed during the corpus analysis.
A Flexible Environment for Building Task Models
12 Citations2001Cécile Paris, Jean-Claude Tarby +1 more
eScholarship (California Digital Library)Evaluating the Effects of Natural Language Generation Techniques on Reader Satisfaction
12 Citations2001Charles Callaway, James C. Lester
The evaluation of S TORY B OOK, an implemented narrative prose genera- tion system that produces original fairy tales in the Little Red Riding Hood domain is described, which provides important baselines for research into natural language systems in general.
Understanding a Task Model: An Experiment
10 Citations1998Nadine Ozkan, Cécile Paris +1 more
An empirical study aimed at testing the readability and usability of DIANE+.
Novel help for on-line help
5 Citations1998Cécile Paris, Nadine Ozkan +1 more
Isolde, an authoring tool for technical writers which automates the production of procedural on-line help in hypertext form, emerged from technological advances and fits into current trends in the technical writing community.
The Design of New Technology for Writing On-line Help
4 Citations1998Cécile Paris, Nadine Ozkan +1 more
Isolde has the potential to change substantially the technical writing process as well as the place of technical writers in a software development team, and has been designed through the collaboration of end-users and human computer interaction specialists.