| Abstract: | The Human Use Regulatory Affairs Advisor (HURAA) is a Web-based facility that provides help and training on the ethical use
of human subjects in research, based on documents and regulations in United States federal agencies. HURAA has a number of
standard features of conventional Web facilities and computer-based training, such as hypertext, multimedia, help modules,
glossaries, archives, links to other sites, and page-turning didactic instruction. HURAA also has these intelligent features:
(1) an animated conversational agent that serves as a navigational guide for the Web facility, (2) lessons with case-based
and explanation-based reasoning, (3) document retrieval through natural language queries, and (4) a context-sensitive Frequently
Asked Questions segment, calledPoint & Query. This article describes the functional learning components of HURAA, specifies its computational architecture, and summarizes
empirical tests of the facility on learners. |
