Going beyond PBD: A play-by-play and mixed-initiative approach

Publisher Summary This chapter explores the Procedure Learning On the Web (PLOW) that demonstrates natural language (NL) is a powerful intuitive tool for end users to build Web tasks with significant complexity using only a single demonstration. The natural play-by-play demonstration that would occur in human–human teaching provides enough information for the system to generalize demonstrated actions. Mixed-initiative interaction also makes the task-building process much more convenient and intuitive. Without the system's proactive involvement in learning, the human instructor's job could become very tedious, difficult, and complex. Semantic information in NL description also makes the system more robust by letting it handle the dynamic nature of the Web. Although PLOW sheds more light on NL's roles and the collaborative problem-solving aspects in the end-user programming on the Web, significant challenges still exist and new ones will emerge as application domains are expanded. Better reasoning about tasks, broader coverage of language understanding, and more robust Web object handling will be needed to address the challenges.