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Introduction

I recently have begun giving serious thought to what command chaining might look like in Ubiquity and the various considerations which must be made to make it happen. The “command chaining,” or “piping,” described here always involves (at least) two verbs acting sequentially on a passed target—that is, the first command performs some action or lookup and the second command acts on the first command’s output.

A few days ago I penned some initial technical considerations regarding command chaining. In this post I’ll be point out some linguistic considerations involved in supporting a natural syntax for chaining.

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The Hit List is a to-do list app for Mac OS X with a beautiful interface and some nice features. Creator Andy Kim’s latest blog post (Better Software Through Less UI) is excellent reading for the Ubiquity community. He describes the thought process behind the design of a new clean and “frictionless” interface for specifying how tasks are repeated. After throwing out the regular combinations and templates of different input widgets, his solution was to implement a partial natural language input interface:

There is no myriad of buttons and fields to choose from. All the user has to do is directly type in what he wants.

Here are a couple other choice quotes which will ring true for the Ubiquity users and internationalization folks in the audience:

For this to work without driving the user mad, the natural language parser has to be near perfect. The last thing I want is for this to come out smelling like AppleScript.

Problems
This design isn’t perfect as it has two glaring problems. One is that the user has no easy way of discovering how complex the recurrence rules can be. This isn’t such a huge problem, but a way to solve this is to include a help button to show example rules or to include an accompanying iCal style UI to let the user setup the recurrence rule in a more typical fashion. I didn’t include these in the initial implementation though because I wanted to see how users would react to this kind of UI.
Another problem is localization. Even if I write parsers for a few more popular languages, it won’t accommodate the rest of the users in the world. Again, the solution is an accompanying traditional UI, but for now, I’m leaving it the way it is until I get some feedback.

There’s a trend in the wind, my friends: the incorporation of near-natural language for more humane interfaces.

A few weeks ago I made some visual mockups of how Ubiquity could look and act in Japanese. Part of this proposal was what I called “particle identification”: that is, immediate in-line identification of delimiters of arguments, which can be overridden by the user:

The inspiration for this idea came from Aza’s blog post “Solving the ‘it’ problem” which advocates for this type of quick feedback to the user in cases of ambiguity. Such a method would help both the user better understand what is being interpreted by the system, as well as offer an opportunity for the user to correct improper parses. I just tried mocking up such an input box using jQuery.

➔ Try the User-Aided Disambiguation Demo

If you have any bugfixes to submit or want to play around with your own copy, the demo code is up on BitBucket. ^^ Let me know what you think!

I’m very happy to announce that, starting today, I will be working full-time on Ubiquity, a Mozilla Labs experiment to connect the web with language. I’ll be heading up research on different linguistic issues of import to a linguistic user interface and blogging about these topics here. If you’re interested, please subscribe to my blog’s RSS feed or the RSS feed for only Ubiquity-related items. Commenting is encouraged! ^^

Every day, more users are trying out Ubiquity, the Mozilla Labs experiment that lets users accomplish common Internet tasks faster through a natural language interface. As we live more and more of our lives on the web, there is a huge appeal to—and need for—a faster way to access and mashup our information.

But what exactly do we mean by a “natural language interface”? Is it just another programming language with lots of English keywords? Should the final goal be a computer that understands everything we tell it?

As we think about the future directions and possibilities of Ubiquity, we need to go back to our roots and understand the project’s motivations. With that in mind, here are some initial thoughts on the advantages of a natural language interface. The ultimate goal here is to refine the notion of natural language interface and to come up with a set of principles that we can follow in pushing Ubiquity further, into other languages and beyond.

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