LEARNING TEXT EDITING TASKS FROM EXAMPLES: A PROCEDURAL APPROACH
Date
1990-06-01
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Abstract
Reformatting blocks of semi-structured information is a common editing task
that typically involves highly repetitive actions sequences, but ones
where exceptional cases arise constantly and must be dealt with as they
arise. This paper describes a procedural programming-by-example approach
to repetitive text editing which allows users to construct programs within
a standard editing interface and extend them incrementally. Following a
brief practice period during which they settle on an editing strategy
for the task at hand, users commence editing in the normal way. Once the
first block of text has been edited, they inform the learning system
which constructs a generalized procedure from the actions that have
been recorded. The system then attempts to apply the procedure to the
next block of text, by predicting editing actions and displaying them for
confirmation. If the user accepts a prediction, the action is carried out
(and the program may be generalized accordingly); otherwise the user is
asked to intervene and supply additional information, in effect debugging
the program on the fly.
A pilot implementation is described that operates in a simple interactive
point-and-click editor (MacIntosh MINIEDIT), along with its performance
on three sample tasks. In one case the procedure was learned correctly
from the actions on the first text block, while in the others minor
debugging was needed on subsequent text blocks. In each case a much
smaller number of both keystrokes and mouse-clicks was required
compared with normal editing, without the system making any prior
assumptions about the structure of the text except for some general
knowledge about lexical patterns. Although a smooth interactive
interface has not yet been constructed, the results obtained serve to
indicate the potential of this approach for semi-structured editing tasks.
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Computer Science