Using Kintsch's discourse comprehension theory to model the user's coding of an informative message from an enabling information retrieval system

With new interactive technology, information science can use its traditiona l information focus to increase user satisfaction by designing information retrieval systems (IRSs) that inform the user about her task, and help the user get the task done, while the user is on-line interacting with the syst em. By doing so, the system enables the user to perform the task for which the information is being sought. In previous articles, we modeled the infor mation flow and coding operations of a user who has just received an inform ative ins message, dividing the user's processing of the ins message into t hree subsystem levels. In this article, we use Kintsch's proposition-based construction-integration theory of discourse comprehension to further detai l the user coding operations that occur in each of the three subsystems. Ou r enabling devices are designed to facilitate a specific coding operation i n a specific subsystem. In this article, we describe an ins device made up of two separate parts that enable the user's (1) decoding and (2) encoding of an ins message in the Comprehension subsystem.