Abstract
The paper is concerned with the question of whether and under what conditions active help systems with plan recognition components that have been developed in the environment of artificial intelligence research are able to prove their value in the real context of commercial application programs. The question is investigated using the development of the COMFOHELP intelligent help system as an example. COMFOHELP supports the COMFOTEX graphical text processing program and has been developed by the Linguistic Information Science Group at the University of Regensburg since 1988. The system recognizes erroneous and suboptimal plans pursued by the user by analyzing the dialog history and comparing them with the correct plan for achieving the user's goal.
Section 2 discusses the research situation and elaborates on those problems which up to now prevented research concepts for plan recognition and intelligent help systems from being practically applied. Testing error situations empirically is a first prerequisite since potential erroneous plans can only be established in real-world tests. The second prerequisite is a special system architecture which counteracts the problem of ambiguities in plan recognition. Section 3 introduces a first still restricted prototype version of COMFOHELP whose efficiency was verified in a statistical hypothesis test. The users performing their text processing tasks with the support of COMFOHELP came off significantly better than members of a reference group working without the intelligent help. Section 4 shows that the proposed COMFOHELP system architecture is reconfirmed by the results of extensive empirical investigations (with more than 100 users) of erroneous plans when using a more complex version of COMFOTEX. The architecture still proves to be worthwhile even when functionality is increased by a factor of three to four.
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Krause, J., Mittermaier, E. & Hirschmann, A. The intelligent help system COMFOHELP. User Model User-Adap Inter 3, 249–282 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01257891
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01257891