1. Shijian Lu and C écile Paris CSIRO ICT Centre Sydney, Australia Authoring Content Structure for Adaptive Documents

2. www.csiro.au Outline  Motivation and background  Our AH framework  Constructor  Discussion  Conclusions

3. www.csiro.au Motivations  People have different (information) needs Adaptive systems becoming increasingly important  To make these systems more practical, their users need to be able to author the resources required

4. www.csiro.au Background: Two Main Types of Systems Systems with an open set of (heterogeneous) information resources Systems that create a tailored hypermedia space Often based on linguistics principles Systems with a closed set of information resources Systems that provide navigation & support in an existing hypermedia space Often based on learning theories Systems with an open set of (heterogeneous) information resources Systems that create a tailored hypermedia space Often based on linguistics principles

5. www.csiro.au A Tailored Document Environment I am a surveillance operator for the region Information sources for the application Specific ApplicationUser Interface User Tailored Documents and Presentations User Query Framework Resources

6. www.csiro.au Myriad: our platform for contextualised information retrieval and delivery  Main component: Virtual Document Planner, a multimedia generation system:  dynamically produces hypermedia documents  belongs to systems working with open set of information sources  employs a planning engine  based on linguistic principles (coherence)  employs discourse and presentation strategies  highly modular, with declarative resources  Articulates a notion of context (e.g., user, task, environment, dialogue history)  Has been used to built a number of applications RST-Enablement RST-Background RST-List The documents have an internal structure

7. www.csiro.au A Tailored Document Environment I am a surveillance operator for the region Information sources for the application Specific ApplicationUser Interface User Tailored Documents and Presentations User Query Framework Resources

8. www.csiro.au Example of a required resource (a plan operator) several-themes-4 Provide brief-description of projects in a research-lab) (Provide brief-summary of projects ?research-lab to ?user) (set ?projects (retrieval:GetLabAttributes ?research-lab project)) (Morethan 1 (size ?projects)) (set ?content (retrieval:GetProjectAttributePairs project name summary id ?projectss)) (inform ?user list-of-entities ?content) optional Preparation (Inform ?user Name "Research Areas")

9. www.csiro.au What is required to write such a plan…  Writing skills (how to structure a document in the application domain and ensure it is coherent)  Computational linguistic skills (how to transform the desired structure into discourse plans, exploiting rhetorical relations)  Knowledge about where to find the information  Knowledge about the required specific syntax and XML Clearly difficult!

10. www.csiro.au Providing an abstraction on the discourse operators  Allow authors to specify the structure and content of a text without:  computational linguistics expertise  knowledge about the specific syntax required  Decouple specification of the structure of a text from:  knowledge of how to retrieve data  specification of the applicability of the structure (i.e., the specification of the constraints for an operator).

11. www.csiro.au Two main concepts  Content structure  Retrieval registry  library of retrieval functions or specifications (“retrieval services”), specifying how to get the data.

12. www.csiro.au An Example from SciFly Produces brochures about CSIRO ICT Centre Brochures tailored to the user’s request Demonstrated at CeBit (2005-2006, Sydney)

13. www.csiro.au Constructor: an authoring tool to build content structures

14. www.csiro.au Goal 1 Constraint Indicate iteration Rhetorical relation Goal 2 Goal 3 Constructor: an overview

15. www.csiro.au A short example for building a content structure  Defining a node and its decomposition  Defining relationships between nodes

16. www.csiro.au Click on Node tool Creating a content node (1)

17. www.csiro.au Click on Node decomposition pane Node edit dialog box Creating a content node (2)

18. www.csiro.au Change to desired node name Creating a content node (3)

19. www.csiro.au Click on “link” icon Defining relationships between nodes (1)

20. www.csiro.au 2. Drag the cursor to the essential node 1. Pressing on a non- essential node 3. Release the mouse at the essential node Defining relationships between nodes (2)

21. www.csiro.au Defining relationships between nodes (3) Select the appropriate relation from the drop down menu

22. www.csiro.au Defining relationships between nodes (4)

23. www.csiro.au Discussion: building content structures  Authors must think explicitly about document structure and relationships between different chunks of information (not about phrasing)  Differences with authoring a document:  Result is an instance of a document  Authors must know actual content  Authors must think about exact order  Authors must work on phrasing  Result is a document specification (from which many documents can be generated)  Authors need to point to where actual content is to be found  System will reason about actual order based on relations  System will generate appropriate phrasing  Authors must think of scope Authoring a documentAuthoring a content structure

24. www.csiro.au Conclusions  Constructor is a tool to help write discourse operators required to build an AH application in our framework  It provides an abstraction on discourse operators: the content structure  Current considerations:  Extensive functionality wrt discourse operators  Interface proper needs improvements  Future work:  Full integration with generation system to allow for “preview”  Evaluation  Allow the authoring of presentation operators