Information sought and information provided
Martha E. Pollack · ACM SIGCHI Bulletin · 1985
Transcripts of computer-mail users seeking advice from an expert were studied to investigate the complementary claims that people often do not know what information they need to obtain in order to achieve their goals, and consequently, that experts must identify inappropriate queries and infer and respond to the goals behind them. This paper reports on one facet of the transcript analysis, namely, the identification of the types of relation that hold between the action that an advice-seeker asks about and the action that an expert tells him how to perform. Three such relations between actions are identified: generates, enables, and is-alternative-to . The claim is made that a cooperative advice-providing system, such as a help system or an expert system, must be able to compute these relations between actions.