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 …

Date

2015

Authors

Yolanda Gil

Journal

ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TiiS)

Volume

5

Issue

1

Pages

1-29

Publisher

ACM