Windows as a Second Language: An Overview of the Jargon Project
- Tim Paek ,
- Raman Chandrasekar
Proceedings of the First International Conference on Augmented Cognition |
When novice users request help from expert sources, they often have difficulty articulating the nature of their problems due to their unfamiliarity with the appropriate technical terms or “jargon.” Consequently, in searching for help documents, they struggle to identify query terms that are likely to retrieve the relevant documents. There is often a vocabulary mismatch between the technical language of help documents or experts and the common language of novice users. At Microsoft, as part of the Jargon Project, we are exploring methods to characterize the use of jargon by different communities of users, and techniques to exploit user models based on jargon-related features to provide customized and more appropriate help and support. This paper provides an overview of the Project and presents preliminary results demonstrating the feasibility of distinguishing types of users by their jargon use.