We describe a highly interactive system for bidirectional, broad-coverage spoken language communication in the healthcare area. The paper briefly reviews the system's interactive foundations, and then goes on to discuss in greater depth issues of practical usability. We present our Translation Shortcuts facility, which minimizes the need for interactive verification of sentences after they have been vetted once, considerably speeds throughput while maintaining accuracy, and allows use by minimally literate patients for whom any mode of text entry might be difficult. We also discuss facilities for multimodal input, in which handwriting, touch screen, and keyboard interfaces are offered as alternatives to speech input when appropriate. In order to deal with issues related to sheer physical awkwardness, we briefly mention facilities for hands-free or eyes-free operation of the system. Finally, we point toward several directions for future improvement of the system.
A“cognitive discourse analysis” was employed to analyze instructions for using a word processor written by eighth-grade students. The approach analyzes text structure in order to specify underlying semantic and conceptual knowledge structures. Our analyses revealed that the written instructions produced by the student writers were deficient in providing a reader with the information necessary for performing the task in two distinct ways. First, the group of students as a whole presented insufficient content information in their texts, particularly with respect to the subprocedures required to use the word processor. Second, the organization of students' texts did not parallel the hierarchical structure of the procedures described. These results suggest the importance of looking at writing from the point of view of the knowledge structures being expressed.
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