Participatory Design for Linguistic Engineering: the Case of the GEPPETTO Development Environment
Fabio Ciravegna, Alberto Lavelli, Daniela Petrelli, Fabio Pianesi · 1997
Current tools for Linguistic Engineering (LE) do not completely fit the requirements for scale development and deployment of real applications. What seems to lack in the available tools is a comprehensive study of user needs. This is a real limitation in a field where people with very different backgrounds (from computer scientists to linguists) are involved. To avoid such a shortcoming we adopted the Participatory Design (PD) methodology, i.e. a User Centered approach that favors the definition of tools suited to the real user needs. In this paper we show how such methodology was used in the design and implementation of a development environment for LE applications. 1 Introduction The growing number of applications exploiting NLP techniques is bringing about a shift from an artisan attitude with respect to NLP towards the need for more sophisticated solutions and tools (Linguistic Engineering, LE). Consequently, interest has increased in the study and implementation of environments...