Abstract
This paper is concerned with the use of discourse analysis and observation to elicit expert knowledge. In particular, we describe the use of these techniques to acquire knowledge about expert problem solving in an information provision environment. Our method of analysis has been to make audio-recordings of real-life information interactions between users (the clients) and human intermediaries (the experts) in document retrieval situations. These tapes have then been transcribed and analysed utterance-by-utterance in the following ways: assigning utterances to one of the prespecified functional categories; identifying the specific purposes of each utterance; determining the knowledge required to perform each utterance; grouping utterances into functional and focus-based sequences. The long-term goal of the project is to develop an intelligent document retrieval system based on a distributed expert, blackboard architecture.