Enabling Non-Linguists to Author Advanced Conversational Interfaces Easily

The study presented in this paper evaluates current progress in a long term effort to provide behavior oriented authoring tools to user interface developers to facilitate rapid development of advanced language understanding interfaces. The results of our study show promise that authors with very little training in computational linguistics can perform nearly as well as graduate students in a language technologies program at tasks that isolate the individual skills required to use our authoring interface for building language understanding interfaces. We discuss implications of these results as well as current directions in this long term project.