A Smart Help System Using Software Manuals

摘要

This paper presents a method for providing smart help using application software manuals. This system has four phases in the process: understanding, matching, planning and paraphrasing phase. A manual text found in the matching phase is paraphrased using the analysis result in the understanding phase. Rhetorical structure of the selected manual is used to determine which clauses in the matched manual text are specifically relevant to the user's question. Four paraphrasing methods for a novice user are identified by a subject experiment, and rules for these methods are applied in respect to the linguistic features extracted in the understanding phase. A prototype system is implemented, and its abilities and problems are discussed.