Methods of Disambiguating Command Term Abbreviations for Interactive Computer Systems

Abstract

The use of a truncation rule for abbreviating command terms is susceptible to the problem that two or more terms may share the same abbreviation. In order to disambiguate such duplications, one of two possible strategies can be employed. One can insist that all abbreviations adhere to the truncation rule, and that ambiguities be resolved by requiring users to enter enough letters in a term so as to uniquely identify it within the set of all command terms (consistent rule/inconsistent length). An alternative approach is to require all abbreviations be of the same length and that a secondary rule for abbreviation formation be applied when truncation would result in duplications (inconsistent rule/consistent length). An experiment compared these two approaches by having subjects memorize a set of command term/abbreviation pairings that used each of the two above strategies. The subjects were then tested on their ability to encode the terms into abbreviations and decode the abbreviations back into terms. The consistent rule/inconsistent length resulted in significantly superior performance (faster and more accurate). Furthermore, an error analysis revealed that the types of errors made were generally less severe in the consistent rule/inconsistent length approach than in the inconsistent rule/consistent length approach.