Clarification Dialogues: A Step Toward-Semantic-Level interaction Paradigms
Abstract
Interface designers typically think of dialogs in terms of low-level, relatively syntactic interactions such as menu selections. When trying to make systems with complex information spaces more accessible to users, however, providing graphical user interfaces that deal mainly with such low-level presentation concerns is only part of the solution. Of greater importance is the use of interaction paradigms based on a notion of well-defined, higher-level dialog games in human-to-human interaction, facilitate communication by making it clearer what capabilities each side is expected to have, the kinds of input they expect, and how they can be expected to have, the kinds of input they expect, and how they can be expected to interpret and respond to those inputs. In this paper we describe how a particular interaction paradigm of this kind, called specification by reformulation, can be seen as a clarification dialog, one form of dialog game. We focus on presenting the procedure involved in analyzing new application domains in order to instantiate this paradigm within them, and exemplify with an implementation of a tool to assist users in selecting reports from a very large database system. User dialogs, User interface paradigms, Complex information spaces, Clarification dialogs, Dialog games, Specification by reformulation, Retrieval by reformulation.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 1992
- Accession Number
- ADA269525
Entities
People
- Peter Aberg
- Robert T. Neches
Organizations
- University of Southern California