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Human Tutorial Instruction in the Raw

Published: 25 March 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Humans learn procedures from one another through a variety of methods, such as observing someone do the task, practicing by themselves, reading manuals or textbooks, or getting instruction from a teacher. Some of these methods generate examples that require the learner to generalize appropriately. When procedures are complex, however, it becomes unmanageable to induce the procedures from examples alone. An alternative and very common method for teaching procedures is tutorial instruction, where a teacher describes in general terms what actions to perform and possibly includes explanations of the rationale for the actions. This article provides an overview of the challenges in using human tutorial instruction for teaching procedures to computers. First, procedures can be very complex and can involve many different types of interrelated information, including (1) situating the instruction in the context of relevant objects and their properties, (2) describing the steps involved, (3) specifying the organization of the procedure in terms of relationships among steps and substeps, and (4) conveying control structures. Second, human tutorial instruction is naturally plagued with omissions, oversights, unintentional inconsistencies, errors, and simply poor design. The article presents a survey of work from the literature that highlights the nature of these challenges and illustrates them with numerous examples of instruction in many domains. Major research challenges in this area are highlighted, including the difficulty of the learning task when procedures are complex, the need to overcome omissions and errors in the instruction, the design of a natural user interface to specify procedures, the management of the interaction of a human with a learning system, and the combination of tutorial instruction with other teaching modalities.

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    cover image ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems
    ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems  Volume 5, Issue 1
    March 2015
    164 pages
    ISSN:2160-6455
    EISSN:2160-6463
    DOI:10.1145/2744352
    Issue’s Table of Contents
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    Publication History

    Published: 25 March 2015
    Accepted: 01 June 2013
    Revised: 01 February 2013
    Received: 01 September 2011
    Published in TIIS Volume 5, Issue 1

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    Author Tags

    1. Procedure learning
    2. end-user programming
    3. instruction
    4. intelligent user interfaces
    5. interactive learning
    6. natural language interpretation

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    • (2021)Unpacking Human Teachers’ Intentions for Natural Interactive Task Learning2021 30th IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN)10.1109/RO-MAN50785.2021.9515448(1173-1180)Online publication date: 8-Aug-2021
    • (2017)Enriching how-to guides with actionable phrases and linked dataWeb Intelligence10.3233/WEB-17036415:3(189-203)Online publication date: 11-Aug-2017
    • (2017)Towards Automating Data NarrativesProceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces10.1145/3025171.3025193(565-576)Online publication date: 7-Mar-2017
    • (2016)Enriching How-to Guides by Linking Actionable PhrasesProceedings of the 25th International Conference Companion on World Wide Web10.1145/2872518.2890585(939-944)Online publication date: 11-Apr-2016

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