Nils Diewald & Marc Kupietz

User-Interface Concepts of KorAP

Workshop: Corpus Harmonization and Language Comparison,
Bucharest, 2018-09-27

Overview

  1. Motivation

  2. Dialogue principles

  3. Next Steps

1. Motivation

Challenges

  • A common interface to query and access corpus data in a sustainable way creates 2 new challenges (Söhn et al., 2008, p. 27):

    • has to be “general enough to cover multiple corpora with heterogeneous annotation and specific enough to enable users to find the information they are looking for.”

    • “should assist users who cannot be expected to be experts [...] (and) should do justice to the experienced user and support efficient data access.”

Challenges

  • “We are convinced that there is no easy solution to that dilemma”
    (Fandrych et al., 2016, p. 286)

Approach

  • “Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.” - Alan Kay

  • “Easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible.” - Larry Wall

  • Ideas: As few clicks as possible to get to the underlying data of an interesting match; hide unnecessary information ...

2. Dialogue principles

Usability
ISO-9241-11 - Ergonomics of Human System Interaction - Part 11

  • Effectiveness: Usability is measured by the extent to which the intended goals of use of the overall system are achieved.

  • Efficiency: The resources that have to be expended to achieve the intended goals.

  • Satisfaction: The extent to which the user finds the overall system acceptable.

Dialogue Principles
ISO-9241-110 - Ergonomics of Human System Interaction - Part 110

  1. Suitability for the task

  2. Self-Descriptiveness

  3. Controllability

  4. Conformity with user expectations

  5. Error tolerance

  6. Suitability for individualization

  7. Suitability for Learning

1. Suitability for the task
ISO-9241-110 - Ergonomics of Human System Interaction - Part 110

  • The user is supported in the effective and efficient completion of the task.

1. Suitability for the task - Example
“Google”-Metaphor; Annotation Assistant; queryByMatch

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1. Suitability for the task - Improvements

  • More assistants

    • Improved query assistant (#70)

    • corpusByMatch assistant (#27)

    • queryByMatch assistant for spans and relations (#68)

  • Improving pagination (#5)

  • Suggestions in the VC Builder

  • Specialized helpers via plugins

2. Self-Descriptiveness
ISO-9241-110 - Ergonomics of Human System Interaction - Part 110

  • Each dialogue step is immediately comprehensible

2. Self-Descriptiveness - Example 1

  • The complete query is human readable as a simple sentence

    [query] in [VC] with [QL]

  • In the future, this could be expanded

    [Search/Group] [query] in [VC] with [QL] (on [GroupRules])

2. Self-Descriptiveness - Example 2
Sentence-Metaphor; Visual representation of Virtual Corpora

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2. Self-Descriptiveness - Improvements

  • Improve findability of assistants!

  • Syntax Highlighting in the search bar (#69)

  • Making metadata fields more understandable (#40)

  • Better textual descriptions

3. Controllability
ISO-9241-110 - Ergonomics of Human System Interaction - Part 110

  • The user is able to initiate and control the direction and pace of the interaction

3. Controllability - Example
No Order of Query Creation; No intermediate steps between Search and Results

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3. Controllability - Improvements

  • Support history for VC creation

4. Conformity with user expectations
ISO-9241-110 - Ergonomics of Human System Interaction - Part 110

  • The interface conforms with the user expectations, is consistent and corresponds to the user characteristics, such as task knowledge, education, experience, and to commonly accepted conventions.

4. Conformity with user expectations - Example
Windows-Buttons in Views; Icons following Fontawesome

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4. Conformity with user expectations - Improvements

  • Improve rewrite semantics for VCs (#65)

5. Error Tolerance
ISO-9241-110 - Ergonomics of Human System Interaction - Part 110

  • Despite evident errors in the input, the intended result may be achieved with either no or minimal action by the user.

5. Error Tolerance - Example
Syntax-Error Hint

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5. Error Tolerance - Improvements

  • Suggest login in case of zero results (#67)

  • Improve error messages (#8)

  • Improve rewrite semantics for VCs (#65)

6. Suitability for individualization
ISO-9241-110 - Ergonomics of Human System Interaction - Part 110

  • The interface can be modified to suit the task needs, individual preferences, and skills of the user.

6. Suitability for individualization - Improvements

  • Support user properties (default QLs, default annotation foundries ...)

  • Remember the user’s search history (#70)

7. Suitability for Learning
ISO-9241-110 - Ergonomics of Human System Interaction - Part 110

  • The interface supports and guides the user in learning to use the system.

7. Suitability for Learning - Example
Integrated tutorial; query by match

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7. Suitability for Learning - Improvements

  • Interactive introduction to KorAP via Intro.js (#19)

3. Next Steps

Next Steps

  • Implement planned features

  • “Who uses such platforms for what kind of purposes in which ways”? (Fandrych et al., 2016, p. 280)

    • Paying attention to user feedback (esp. from DRuKoLa)

    • Conduct a user study (following Fandrych et al., 2016)

    • Collect usage information with Matomo

Thank you very much for your attention! Questions? Ideas?

References

Anthony, Laurence (2013):

A critical look at software tools in corpus linguistics. In: Linguistic Research 30, pp. 141-161.

Fandrych, Christian/Frick, Elena/Hedeland, Hanna/Iliash, Anna/Jettka, Daniel/Meißner, Cordula/Schmidt, Thomas/Wallner, Franziska/Weigert, Kathrin/Westpfahl, Swantje (2016):

User, who art thou? User Profiling for Oral Corpus Platforms. In: Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2016), May 23-28, Portorož, Slovenia.

Heid, Ulrich (2013):

Usability Tests und "usability design" für die Entwicklung von Internetwörterbüchern. Gastbeitrag zum 6. Arbeitstreffen des DFG-Netzwerks "Internetlexikographie", 20.11.2013, Mannheim.

ISO/TC 159/SC 4 (2006) ISO 9241:

Ergonomics of human-system interaction -- Part 11: Usability: Definitions and concepts & Part 110: Dialogue principles. International Organization for Standardization.

Söhn, Jan-Philipp/Zinsmeister, Heike/Rehm, Georg (2008):

Requirements of a user-friendly, general-purpose corpus query interface. In: Proceedings of the LREC 2008 Workshop Sustainability of Language Resources and Tools for Natural Language Processing, May 31, Marrakech, Morocco.