The vocabulary problem in human-system communication
@article{Furnas1987TheVP, title={The vocabulary problem in human-system communication}, author={George W. Furnas and Thomas K. Landauer and Louis M. Gomez and Susan T. Dumais}, journal={Commun. ACM}, year={1987}, volume={30}, pages={964-971} }
In almost all computer applications, users must enter correct words for the desired objects or actions. For success without extensive training, or in first-tries for new targets, the system must recognize terms that will be chosen spontaneously. We studied spontaneous word choice for objects in five application-related domains, and found the variability to be surprisingly large. In every case two people favored the same term with probability <0.20. Simulations show how this fundamental property…
1,620 Citations
The Vocabulary Problem in Human-System Communication: an Analysis and a Solution
- Computer Science
- 1987
Many, many alternative access words are needed for users to get what they want from large and complex systems and an optimal strategy, unlimited aliasing, is derived and shown to be capable of several-fold improvements.
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- Linguistics
- 1998
Designers of spoken dialogue systems need to be able to predict and constrain the words people use in speech directed at these systems, and the potential for variability in word choices is enormous.
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- Computer ScienceSIGDIAL Workshop
- 2003
It is found that novice users successfully learn the form of system requests, achieving a significant decrease in ill-formed utterances, but the working vocabulary on which novice users converge is significantly smaller than that of expert users, and their rate of speech recognition errors remains higher.
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- 1998
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- Linguistics2013 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing
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An approach to the use of lexical entrainment in Spoken Dialog Systems is proposed, which aims to increase the dialog success rate by adapting the lexical choices of the system to the user's Lexical choices.
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- PhysicsInt. J. Hum. Comput. Stud.
- 2001
The concept of “habitability” is explored in relation to the design of dialogues for speech-based systems, and suggests that for speech input, spoken menu prompts may be more habitable than similar menus shown on a visual display.
The Gesture Disagreement Problem in Free-hand Gesture Interaction
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It is found that the chance for users to produce the same gesture for a given task is below 0.355 on average, and offering a set of gesture candidates can improve the agreement score.
The Vocabulary Problem in Collaboration
- Computer Science
- 2002
This research has shown the feasibility of an algorithmic approach to solving the vocabulary problem in collaboration by adopting automatic indexing, cluster analysis, and neural network classification techniques.
Adapting Spoken Dialog Systems Towards Domains and Users
- Computer Science
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This thesis built models to recognize the complex user intentions and enable the system to communicate with the user at the task level, in addition to the individual domain level, and believes that adaptation in these three levels can contribute to the quality of human-machine interactions.
Building Databases for the Computer-Based Memorization System.
- Computer Science
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The Computer-Based Memorization System (CBMS), which specifies the facts that students are to know and how well the facts are to be known, uses a compiled form of an associative network for its…
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