Question‐Answering for Intelligent On‐Line Help: The Process of Intelligent Responding

This article examines the process of specifying a question‐answering help facility in the context of UNIX mail. The specification was based upon experimental expert‐user facilitative dialogues. These dialogues were analyzed using a classification scheme developed for the purpose. The scheme provides a metalanguage for describing patterns of intent and rhetorical structure in dialogue. Using the scheme as a tool, common patterns in expert‐user dialogue emerged, providing insights into both tutoring strategy and the linguistic forms required to generate help output. These were refined to form a set of frames consisting of stereotypical patterns of rhetorical predicates to answer different types of questions which could be adapted to the needs of a particular user. The significance of the system developed from this specification is discussed.