Menu Hierarchy Generation Based on Syntactic Dependency Structures in Item Descriptions

The present paper proposes a procedural design method which makes use of dependency structures underlying menu item descriptions in order to generate well-structured and easily-learned menu hierarchies. A dependency structure captures syntactic relations among conceptual units that constitute a natural language description of what function the corresponding menu item stands for. The proposed method classifies computerized system functions after dependency structure prototypes and then serializes variable elements to be specified in each function class after phrase structure analysis. Its clear and consistent policy provides generated menu systems with high communicability to users. The effectiveness of the method is empirically investigated.