Push-style guidance system for technical document writing

This paper proposes a design work support system called push-style guidance system. The system automatically presents some advisory information that helps designers to write technical documents. When the designer adds or revises text on word processor, the text line is immediately sent to the knowledge server with its document structure information, which indicates the location of the text in the document. The server reconstructs the current contents of the document by combining the text lines based on the document structure information. The server analyzes the reconstructed document contents, and evaluates the conformity of preserved guidance generation rules to select appropriate ones. From the selected rules, guidance information is generated and is sent back to the word processor. This enables the simultaneous presentation of information appropriate to the written contents in progress. We have developed a prototype system and evaluated the appropriateness of provided guidance information in a task of writing specifications about electric circuits. Experimental results show that the proposed system performs better than naive systems.