Converse: A means to write, edit, administer, and summarize computer-based dialogue
✍ Scribed by Saul M. Bloom; Robert J. White; Robert F. Beckley; Warner V. Slack
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 1978
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 551 KB
- Volume
- 11
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0010-4809
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Over the past 15 years, computers have been used more and more as conversational devices in a variety of roles. The computer is an instructor (I), an interviewer (2), a consultant (3), and a counselor (4), and if the cost of equipment continues to go down, the use of interactive computing can be expected to increase still further. Dialogue with computers is most likely here to stay.
Dialogue for conversational computing must be prepared with techniques that are new to most writers. They must write for interactive communication, yet work within the constraints imposed by the computer and its terminals. The machine must be programmed to present text, offer choices, accept responses, and reply appropriately-with succinctness, cogency, good manners, and a bit of humor here and there. Clearly, this is a difficult job. The medium is new, and the writer's message is sometimes obscure. Yet the most important variable in the success or failure of interactive computing is the quality of the writing.
Programs designed to facilitate the writer's task have been developed in a variety of computer languages (5, 6) including MUMPS (7), a string-manipulating interpretive language (8). This article describes Converse, a programming technique that uses the MIIS dialect of MUMPS. Converse was developed with experience gained from three earlier assembly-language programs (2,9, IO).
Converse is a means to work with the computer, for the most part in English-to construct, edit, and operate computer-based interviews and to analyze responses and generate written summaries. Interviews are written and administered by means of cathode-ray screen terminals with typewriter-like keyboards. During an interview, the time it takes a person to respond to each frame is stored with the responses and can be used, as can other variables established at the writer's discretion, to determine the sequence with which the frames are presented (I I).
In the design of almost any computer-based interviewing system, the complexity