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ExpandHelp: A Flexible Help Architecture For the Rest of Us

Toshiyuki Masui
Although large amount of manuals and help documents are available on current computing
systems, they are not as effectively used as they should be for the following reasons. First,
it is difficult for novice users to find the right word for looking up the entry they need. Second, there are mismatches between what the system can do and what the user wants to do.
Third, users should translate the abstract description in the help system into concrete user
operations.
To make help systems really helpful for users, we developed a flexible help architecture
called ExpandHelp. ExpandHelp contains a natural language database from which wide range
of expressions can be generated so that users can find what they want to do from vague
keywords. When a user gives a keyword 1:23 to ExpandHelp, it will display menu items
like Set the system clock to 11:23, Set the alarm clock to 1:23, etc. for the user to find
and execute what he wants to do. This is made possible by using the generate-and-filter
algorithm applied to the help database consisting of a set of regular expressions for generating
help texts and corresponding command patterns.

1.

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2)

Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, Keio
University

Generate and Filter

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and S. T. Dumais. The vocabulary problem
in human-system communication. Commun.
ACM, 30:964971, November 1987.
3) Greg Little and Robert C. Miller. Translating keyword commands into executable code.
In Proceedings of the 19th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, UIST 06, pages 135144, New York, NY,
USA, 2006. ACM.
4) Sun Wu and Udi Manber. Fast text searching:
allowing errors. Communications of the ACM,
35:8391, October 1992.