Demonstrational automation of text editing tasks involving multiple focus points and conversions

We present a programming by demonstration (PBD) system for text editing tasks and describe over an experimental evaluation of it. Unlike other PBD systems, our system can automate tasks that involve multiple focus points and conversions. In the system, a document is regarded as a sequence of objects and a task is modeled as repetitions of turns, in which the user focuses on subsequences of the document and modifies them. We ran a user study to evaluate the system and found that even nonprogrammers could automate tasks and wanted to use the system for their own tasks.