We describe four usability-enhancing interfaces to CITIDEL aimed at improving the user experience and supporting personalized information access by targeted communities. These comprise: a multimodal interaction facility with capability for out-of-turn input, interactive visualizations for exploratory analysis, a translation center exposing multilingual interfaces, as well as traditional usability enhancements. Pilot studies demonstrate the resulting improvements in quality, as measured across a number of metrics. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User

Personalization constitutes the mechanisms necessary to automatically customize information content, structure, and presentation to the end-user to reduce information overload. Unlike traditional approaches to personalization, the central theme of our approach is to model a website as a program and conduct website transformation for personalization by program transformation (e.g., partial evaluation, program slicing). The goal of this paper is study personalization through a program transformation lens, and develop a formal model, based on program transformations, for personalized interaction with hierarchical hypermedia. The specific research issues addressed involve identifying and developing program representations and transformations suitable for classes of hierarchical hypermedia, and providing supplemental interactions for improving the personalized experience. The primary form of personalization discussed is out-of-turn interaction – a technique which empowers a user navigating a hierarchical website to postpone clicking on any of the hyperlinks presented on the current page and, instead, communicate the

We present an approach to enhancing information access through web structure mining in contrast to traditional approaches involving usage mining. Specifically, we mine the hardwired hierarchical hyperlink structure of websites to identify patterns of term-term cooccurrences we call web FDs (functional dependencies). Intuitively, a web FD ‘x → y ’ declares that all paths through a site involving a hyperlink labeled x also contain a hyperlink labeled y. The complete set of FDs satisfied by a site help characterize (flexible and expressive) interaction paradigms supported by a site, where a paradigm is the set of explorable sequences therein. We describe algorithms for mining FDs, results from mining several hierarchical websites, and present several interface designs that can exploit such FDs to provide compelling user experiences. † Contact author 1

Abstract. Information personalization is fertile ground for application of AI techniques. In this article I relate personalization to the ability to capture partial information in an information-seeking interaction. The specific focus is on personalizing interactions at web sites. Using ideas from partial evaluation and explanation-based generalization, I present a modeling methodology for reasoning about personalization. This approach helps identify seven tiers of ‘personable traits ’ in web sites. 1

The rise of ubiquitous computing devices has provided the catalyst for the next generation World Wide Web, one that shifts the focus from the desktop computer to mobile devices such as cell phones and PDAs, in an ever increasing range of modalities. Web interaction management in this setting must contend with a plethora of interaction interfaces and a diverse range of content types in addition to helping realize the full potential of multimodality (i.e., supporting flexible and personalized interactions between humans and sites). This thesis presents WS://IM, a new software framework for web interaction management that is capable of supporting multimodal interactions. In addition to presenting a loosely bundled, factorized architecture that supports hyperlink interaction, WS://IM has the unique facilitation for out-of-turn interaction. Out-of-turn interaction is a novel technique that helps realize mixed-initiative interactions between humans and Web sites. Design methodology, implementation details, and exposition through three implemented case studies are provided. For My parents and grandparents. Your guidance, support, and encouragement have made all the difference in the world.

Abstract: In this paper we propose the use of multilingual multichannel dialogue systems to improve the usability of web contents. In order to improve both the communication and the portability of those dialogue systems we propose the separation of the general components from the application-specific, language-specific and channel-specific aspects. This paper describes the multilingual dialogue system for accessing web contents we develop following this proposal. It is particularly focused two main components of the system: the dialogue manager and the natural language generator. 1

Personalization involves customizing information access to the end-user. As any new area of computer science research it lacks formal models to guide the design of systems. In this paper, we present a modeling methodology, based on generative programming, for personalizing interactions with hierarchical websites. The methodology entails modeling a user’s interaction with a site in a program and applying program slicing to personalize the interaction. While preserving interactivity, this approach does not require the designer to anticipate all possible user interactions a priori and provide interfaces for each. Moreover, it provides a theoretical, systematic, and implementationneutral way to design systems and is therefore a timely contribution to the young field of personalization as well as a novel application of generative programming. 1

Abstract. We describe the application of generative programming to a problem in interactive information retrieval. The particular interactive information retrieval problem we study is the support for ‘out of turn interaction ’ with a website – how a user can communicate input to a website when the site is not soliciting such information on the current page, but will do so on a subsequent page. Our solution approach makes generous use of program transformations (partial evaluation, currying, and slicing) to delay the site’s current solicitation for input until after the user’s out-of-turn input is processed. We illustrate how studying outof-turn interaction through a generative lens leads to several valuable insights: (i) the concept of a web dialog, (ii) an improved understanding of web taxonomies, and (iii) new web interaction techniques and interfaces. These notions allow us to cast the design of interactive (and responsive) websites in terms of the underlying dialog structure and, further, suggest a simple implementation strategy with a clean separation of concerns. We also highlight new research directions opened up by the generative programming approach to interactive information retrieval such as the idea of web interaction axioms. 1

Information Processing and Management journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/infoproman Supporting multiple paths to objects in information hierarchies:

Personalization involves customizing information access to the end-user. As any new area of computer science research it lacks formal models to guide the design of systems. In this paper, we present a modeling methodology, based on generative programming, for personalizing interactions with hierarchical websites. The methodology entails modeling a user’s interaction with a site in a program and applying program slicing to personalize the interaction. While preserving interactivity, this approach does not require the designer to anticipate all possible user interactions a priori and provide interfaces for each. Moreover, it provides a theoretical, systematic, and implementationneutral way to design systems and is therefore a timely contribution to the young field of personalization as well as a novel application of generative programming. 1