<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="W97-1503">
  <Title>Participatory Design for Linguistic Engineering: the Case of the GEPPETTO Development Environment</Title>
  <Section position="8" start_page="22" end_page="22" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
8 Conclusions and Future Work
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In this paper we have discussed the importance of user involvement in the design of a LEADS and exemplified it by discussing our experience with GEPPETTO. null The PD methodology enabled users to express their desires and needs while participating to the design phase. This permitted to create an environment whose facilities are suited for each of the users/tasks involved in the development of a LEA. The design work started from very general issues (e.g. the definition of the development cycle) and went into very specific details (e.g. the functionalities associated with the buttons of each window).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> It must be stressed that a crucial role was played by the interface design expert, who organized the many different ideas in a concrete and coherent interface layout, provided the necessary insights to analyze user-machine interactions, and continuously stimulated the active cooperation within the working group.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> GEPPETTO has been implemented under Allegro Common Lisp and runs on SUN SPARCstations.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The graphical facilities have been implemented by means of CLIM and Grasper.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> GEPPETTO has been used in the development of a number of applicative projects, in different application domains, including multi-lingual text generation (LRE-GIST), information extraction from agency news (LE-FACILE), and Natural Language information query (LE-TAMIC-P); all these projects have been funded by the European Union.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> Future work on GEPPETTO will address a number of important pending issues. Among them it is worth mentioning: the full implementation of the debugging tools suggested by the user group and the implementation of a number of facilities to improve to consult the manual and were stimulated in exploring GEPPETTO.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> GEPPETTO's capability of supporting the design of LEA architectures.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>