Intelligent Agents for User Interface

I watched a TechTalk at Google (July 25, 2008) that may be relevant to designing an annotation interface for linguistic exploration. In "Intelligent Assistance for Desktop User Tasks" Anthony Tomasic talked about work with John Zimmerman integrating machine learning with UI Design: VIO (being commercialized for SalesForce.com) selects and pre-fills forms from email, and Mixer generates database queries from email. VIO intentionally avoids NLP or domain-specific explicit engineering, looking to evaluate a lightweight solution.

The experience highlights how little I know about machine learning. VIO uses K-way classification (form suggestion), Conditional Random Fields (field s.) and Reference Resolution over instances (instance s.), which is all greek to me. The work is an example of empirical methods, they train their analyzers and evaluate them with experiements on real users.