Task Modeling by the Keywords Extracted from Manual Pages

Abstract

A task modeling method using keywords related to the functions of commands for intelligent user interfaces is proposed. A task model is a description of functions and operations of the computer. The task model is described as the name of a task in our method. We define the name of a task as the minimal set of common keywords which definitely distinguish the task. For the name of a task, keywords indicating the concepts of each command are needed. Since the order of the number of the keywords is that of the number of the commands, it is much easier to implement this method than a procedural knowledge based one. We also propose a method to extract the keywords automatically from the manual pages, the on-line reference manuals for UNIX. Since almost every command is associated with manual pages, the task names can be easily updated when a new command is added to the system. To show the effectiveness of the task names and the keywords extracted from the manual pages, we direct our attention to users' command histories. We show the effectiveness of these keywords by showing the relationship between the tasks in the history and the task names through statistical analysis.