An Evaluation of Procedural Instructional Text

Abstract:

In this talk, I'll be presenting an experiment we did as part of the Isolde project (Integrated Software On-Line Documentation Environment, in cooperation with Cécile Paris (CSIRO/CMIS) and Keith Vander Linden, Calvin College, Grand Rapids, USA). We did 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.

About the speaker:

Dr. Nathalie Colineau has a research background in Natural Language Understanding and Human-Computer Interactions. Her main research interests are speech understanding, discourse analysis and text generation. She has been involved in several projects to design more flexible and natural spoken interfaces. She's currently working on systems that deliver information customised for the user and based on the device constraints. She was based in Thales Research and Technology (Thales corporate research laboratory) from 1998-2000 and is now based in the Intelligent Interactive Technology Group of CSIRO/CMIS.

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Enquiries: sals@ics.mq.edu.au