Preliminary Results with a System for Automatic Protocol Analysis

Abstract : A computer program for automatic protocol analysis (PAS-I) is described in detail. The task of protocol analysis is that of inferring from the verbalizations given by a human while solving a problem the time course of his states of knowledge about the task. PAS-I works only with the task domain of crypt-arithmetic puzzles and incorporates a specific theory of problem solving (as described in Newell and Simon, Human Problem Solving). The input to PAS-I is the transcription of the human's verbalizations (as tape recorded), segmented into topics. The program does a linguistic analysis from the input text to produce a sequence of semantic elements; these are then subjected to several stages of processing, including hypothesizing the information processing operations that the subject performed to produce the semantic knowledge that he appears to have at each moment of time. The final output is a problem behavior graph (PBG) which is the trajectory of the subject through the problem space of possible knowledge states. (Author Modified Abstract)