IT Instructions

IT Instructions

IT-related communication comes in many shapes and forms. One of the main forms is consumer-oriented instruction - the type of text that appears in FAQs, short setup instructions, troubleshooting manuals or responses and requests for assistance.

Instructions require a simple and often rigid format, with very specific terminology. The way they are formulated greatly impacts how users are able to solve problems on their own, and as such, they should avoid any possible ambiguity. 'Go to the Menu Screen, then click Properties', follows a clear step-by-step formulation, that efficiently guides users through the process of fixing their issues and getting their software to work as expected. Terminology is key, simply because there are no synonyms for 'advanced settings', 'Start menu' or 'Add or Remove Programs'. Users will get lost if they see anything else.

This corpus is about users installing new applications, setting up accounts, tweaking their settings and more. It was created using the in-domain training data provided in the WMT16 IT domain adaptation task that consisted of 2,000 answers from cross-lingual hardware and software help-desk service. The WMT data set served as the query corpus to select more matching data containing similar terminology and the instruction style, common for the IT domain.