LARRI: A Language-Based Maintenance and Repair Assistant

LARRI (Language-based Agent for Retrieval of Repair Information) is a dialo- gue-based system for support of maintenance and repair domains, characterized by large amounts of documentation and procedural information. LARRI is based on an architecture developed by Carnegie Mellon University for the DARPA Communicator programme and is integrated with a wearable computer system developed by the Wearable Computing Group at CMU. The system adapts an architecture developed and optimised for a telephone-based problem solving task (travel planning), and applies it to a very different domain — aircraft mainteance. Following two field trials in which LARRI was used by professional aircraft mechanics, we found that our architecture extended readily to a multimodal and multi-media framework. At the same time we found that assumptions that were reasonable in a services domain turn out to be inappropriate for a maintenance domain. Apart from the need to manage integration between input modes and output modalities, we found that the system needed to support multiple categories of tasks and that a different balance between user and system goals was required. A significant problem in the maintenance domain is the need to assimilate and make available for language processing appropriate domain information.