When usability became a major concern in system design, a dichotomy among visual and verbal language arose. Even if both interaction modalities were considered adequate to human capability, the past decades saw the dominance of the graphical approach. In this paradigm, the primary interaction style is Direct Manipulation (DM); verbal language is just a subordinated modality. Words or plain utterances (in the form of menus, error messages or icon labels) are used only when pictures and actions need to be disambiguated. This primitive form of Natural Language (NL) represents an asymmetric medium of communication, since verbal elements are meaningful only to the user. Till very recently, the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community has disregarded NL communication. A direct evidence for this claiming comes from a meta-analysis of previous CHI proceedings. In the period from 1995 to 1999, papers addressing written NL, speech or multimodal communication represent a very small minority, ranging from 3% in 1995 and 1998 to 6% in 1996. At the same time, researchers who work in the NL Processing (NLP) field have been mainly interested in the computational treatment of linguistic inputs. With a few exceptions [for instance: 10, 14], designers neglected user studies, relying on the fact that the interaction would have been naturally user friendly. Despite this, a new tendency is emerging: HCI and NLP are recently unifying their effort to build innovative intelligent interfaces. The change elicits a number of questions that can be proposed as topics for discussion: (a) Are HCI and NLP complementary fields? (b); Where can they meet?; (c) How will NL modify HCI?
Bridging the gap between NLP and HCI: A new synergy in the name of the user
De Angeli, Antonella;
2000-01-01
Abstract
When usability became a major concern in system design, a dichotomy among visual and verbal language arose. Even if both interaction modalities were considered adequate to human capability, the past decades saw the dominance of the graphical approach. In this paradigm, the primary interaction style is Direct Manipulation (DM); verbal language is just a subordinated modality. Words or plain utterances (in the form of menus, error messages or icon labels) are used only when pictures and actions need to be disambiguated. This primitive form of Natural Language (NL) represents an asymmetric medium of communication, since verbal elements are meaningful only to the user. Till very recently, the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community has disregarded NL communication. A direct evidence for this claiming comes from a meta-analysis of previous CHI proceedings. In the period from 1995 to 1999, papers addressing written NL, speech or multimodal communication represent a very small minority, ranging from 3% in 1995 and 1998 to 6% in 1996. At the same time, researchers who work in the NL Processing (NLP) field have been mainly interested in the computational treatment of linguistic inputs. With a few exceptions [for instance: 10, 14], designers neglected user studies, relying on the fact that the interaction would have been naturally user friendly. Despite this, a new tendency is emerging: HCI and NLP are recently unifying their effort to build innovative intelligent interfaces. The change elicits a number of questions that can be proposed as topics for discussion: (a) Are HCI and NLP complementary fields? (b); Where can they meet?; (c) How will NL modify HCI?I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione
