An assistance system for UNIX text formatters

This paper describes an active assistance system for the text formatters on the Unix system. The system is a subcomponent of USCSH, an active assistance interface for Unix being developed at the University of South Carolina. A complete user model has been designed to determine user proficiency in the use of text formatters. The model has two components: an overlay model and a process model. The overlay model is basically a collection of nodes that represent formatting concepts, commands, and tasks, structured in the form of a conceptual hierarchy. The process model infers what kind of text formatting tasks the user is involved in, and if he is making errors, or using inefficient methods in executing them. Using the above information, a prompting mechanism provides the user with messages that explain how certain tasks can be done in an efficient way, using commands that the user does not know about, or a sequence of commands that he has not previously used. Besides, the prompting mechanism also generates “periodic” prompts, to inform the user about formatting commands and tasks that he is unaware off.