2269827
Training wheels in a user interface
New users of high-function application systems can become frustrated and confused by the errors they make in the early stages of learning. A training interface for a commercial word processor was designed to make typical and troublesome error states “unreachable,” thus eliminating the sources of some new-user learning problems. Creating a training environment from the basic function of the system itself afforded substantially faster learning coupled with better learning achievement and better performance on a comprehension post-test. A control group spent almost a quarter of their time recovering from the error states that the training interface blocked off. We speculate on how this training strategy might be refined, and more generally, on how function should be organized in a user interface.
7723669
Better home shopping or new democracy?: evaluating community network outcomes
This is a perspective paper on community networks - socio-technical infrastructures supporting villages, towns, and neighborhoods. Community networking is well-established, world wide, and addresses critical societal issues, such as the “crisis of community” and the sociality of the Internet. However, community network projects have not emphasized evaluation. Relatively little is known about the economic, social, and psychological consequences of community networks for the individuals, groups, and communities served. Evaluating community networks is a momentous mutual opportunity for the development of CHI evaluation methodologies and for bringing technical CHI expertise to bear on societal issues.
5855338
The development of cooperation: five years of participatory design in the virtual school
During the past five years, our research group worked with a group of public school teachers to define, develop, and assess network-based support for collaborative learning in middle school physical science and high school physics. From the outset, we committed to a participatory design approach. This design collaboration has now existed far longer than is typical of participatory design endeavors, particularly in North America. The nature of our interactions, and in particular the nature of the role played by the teachers has changed significantly through the course of the project. We suggest that there may be a long-term developmental unfolding of roles and relationships in participatory design.
14643603
Making use is more than a matter of task analysis
I am pleased and honored that such an impressive group of commentators considered my book Making Use (Carroll, 2000) worthy of discussion and analysis. I would not expect, nor even prefer really, to have everyone agree with me. What would bother me, what would bother any author, is to not be read at all. Dan Diaper’s critical review and the commentaries by David Benyon/Catriona Macaulay, Tom Carey, and Fabio Paterno, will help to make that less likely! Many important themes are raised in Diaper (2002) review and in the commentaries. In this response I want to concentrate on refining a few of the main issues and distinctions. First, I briefly consider contrasts in values. I think that preferences for scenario-based design versus traditional task analytic methods reflect differences in the underlying world views and values of designers and researchers. To some extent, therefore, the issues in this discussion are not just technical, but paradigmatic and moral. Second, I consider the state of design practices in HCI and its implications for where onus lies in contemporary methodological argumentation and for what sorts of data are pertinent and required to address outstanding methodological issues. Finally, I consider the question of how task analysis, in the sense of structured task decomposition, might be reconstructed in the emerging paradigm of scenario-based design.
148806746
Human-computer interaction: psychology as a science of design.
9978523
Community collective efficacy: structure and consequences of perceived capacities in the Blacksburg Electronic Village
Bandura's social cognitive construct "perceived self-efficacy" has been used widely to understand individual behavior as a function of domain-specific beliefs about personal capacities. Collective efficacy is the extension of the self-efficacy construct to organizations and groups; it refers to beliefs about collective capacities in specific domains. Our research is investigating the use of collective efficacy in understanding attitudes and behaviors of members of proximal residential communities with respect to issues like attachment, engagement, and sociality, specifically as modulated by use of the Internet and community networks. This paper describes our analysis of the structure and external validity of the collective efficacy construct.
39105600
Estimating the Reliability of Regeneration-Based Replica Control Protocols
The accessibility of vital information can be enhanced by replicating the data on several sites and employing a consistency control protocol to manage the replicas. The reliability of a replicated data object depends on maintaining a viable set of current replicas. When storage is limited, it may not be feasible to simply replicate a data object at enough sites to achieve the desired level of reliability. Regeneration approximates the reliability provided by additional replicas for a modest increase in storage costs, and is applicable whenever a new replica of a data object can be created faster than a system failure can be repaired. Regeneration enhances reliability by creating new replicas on other sites in response to site failures. Several strategies for replica maintenance are considered, and the benefits of each are analyzed using simulation and both algebraic and numeric solutions to systems of differential equations. >
16528770
Text Categorization for Improved Priors of Word Meaning
Distributions of the senses of words are often highly skewed. This fact is exploited by word sense disambiguation (WSD) systems which back off to the predominant (most frequent) sense of a word when contextual clues are not strong enough. The topic domain of a document has a strong influence on the sense distribution of words. Unfortunately, it is not feasible to produce large manually sense-annotated corpora for every domain of interest. Previous experiments have shown that unsupervised estimation of the predominant sense of certain words using corpora whose domain has been determined by hand outperforms estimates based on domain-independent text for a subset of words and even outperforms the estimates based on counting occurrences in an annotated corpus. 
 
In this paper we address the question of whether we can automatically produce domain-specific corpora which could be used to acquire predominant senses appropriate for specific domains. We collect the corpora by automatically classifying documents from a very large corpus of newswire text. Using these corpora we estimate the predominant sense of words for each domain. We first compare with the results presented in [1]. Encouraged by the results we start exploring using text categorization for WSD by evaluating on a standard data set (documents from the SENSEVAL-2 and 3 English all-word tasks). We show that for these documents and using domain-specific predominant senses, we are able to improve on the results that we obtained with predominant senses estimated using general, non domain-specific text. We also show that the confidence of the text classifier is a good indication whether it is worthwhile using the domain-specific predominant sense or not.
7294316
The Second Release of the RASP System
We describe the new release of the RASP (robust accurate statistical parsing) system, designed for syntactic annotation of free text. The new version includes a revised and more semantically-motivated output representation, an enhanced grammar and part-of-speech tagger lexicon, and a more flexible and semi-supervised training method for the structural parse ranking model. We evaluate the released version on the WSJ using a relational evaluation scheme, and describe how the new release allows users to enhance performance using (in-domain) lexical information.
8413372
Relating Complexity to Practical Performance in Parsing with Wide-Coverage Unification Grammars
The paper demonstrates that exponential complexities with respect to grammar size and input length have little impact on the performance of three unification-based parsing algorithms, using a wide-coverage grammar. The results imply that the study and optimisation of unification-based parsing must rely on empirical data until complexity theory can more accurately predict the practical behaviour of such parsers1.
1954
Corpus Annotation for Parser Evaluation
We describe a recently developed corpus annotation scheme for evaluating parsers that avoids shortcomings of current methods. The scheme encodes grammatical relations between heads and dependents, and has been used to mark up a new publicdomain corpus of naturally occurring English text. We show how the corpus can be used to evaluate the accuracy of a robust parser, and relate the corpus to extant resources.