Helping End Users Modify Procedures by Instruction

Many useful planning applications are handled by plan execution tools, such as PRS, that keep track of several interacting goals and tasks, and different ways to expand them, using procedure definitions. I describe Tailor, an implemented tool to help end users modify the procedure definitions used in these tools by interpreting instructions given as short sentences. This approach allows a natural and flexible interaction style in which users can refer to tasks by name or by their arguments, may skip some of the details of a conditions and use synonyms. Tailor uses search to find task modifications that match the user’s input, warns about potential problems that the modifications may introduce and suggests fixes. We conducted preliminary tests using Tailor to modify domains drawn from the eHow web site, applying modifications posted by readers as ‘tips’, with promising