An Expert System That Volunteers Advice

Abstract

This paper describes the design and expert system that provides novice users implementation of an Nith help in using the Vax/VMS operating system. The most interesting feature of our advisor is that it follows the user’s interactions with the system and volunteers its help when it believes that the user would benefit from advice. The user need not ask for help or raise an error condition. The adivsor recognizes correct yet inefficient command sequences and helps the beginner become more proficient by indicating how these tasks may be done more efficiently. What are the the inefficient command sequences that we are trying to recognize? There are several dimensions to inefficiency in operating system interactions: Operating systems provide many features (such as wild cards in file names, lists of verb targets, etc) which are meant to minimize the user’s work (e.g., typing).