I can do text analytics! Designing development tools for novice developers

Abstract

Text analytics, an increasingly important application domain, is hampered by the high barrier to entry due to the many conceptual difficulties novice developers encounter. This work addresses the problem by developing a tool to guide novice developers to adopt the best practices employed by expert developers in text analytics and to quickly harness the full power of the underlying system. Taking a user centered task analytical approach, the tool development went through multiple design iterations and evaluation cycles. In the latest evaluation, we found that our tool enables novice developers to develop high quality extractors on par with the state of art within a few hours and with minimal training. Finally, we discuss our experience and lessons learned in the context of designing user interfaces to reduce the barriers to entry into complex domains of expertise. Copyright © 2013 ACM.