Knowledge-Based Systems. Methods for Developing and Evaluating Expert Systems: A Language/Action Model of Human-Computer Communication in a Psychiatric Hospital

摘要

When a staff physician says to an intern he is supervising “I think you should try medication X,” this statement may differ in meaning from the same string of words spoken between colleagues. In the first case, the statement may have the force of an order (“Do this!”), while in the latter it is merely a suggestion. In either case, the utterance sets up important expectations which constrain the future actions of the parties involved. This paper lays out an analytic framework, based on speech act theory, for representing such “conversations for action” so that they may be used to inform the design of human-computer interaction. The language/action design perspective views the information system -- in this case an expert system that monitors drug treatment -- as one of many “agents” within a broad communicative network. Speech act theory is used to model a typical psychiatric hospital unit as a system of communicative action. In addition to identifying and characterizing the primary communicative agents and speech acts, the model presents a taxonomy of key conversational patterns and shows how they may be applied to the design of a clinical monitoring system. In the final section, the advantages and implications of this design approach are discussed.