Multimodal interfaces are becoming increasingly ubiquitous with the advent of mobile devices, accessibility considerations, and novel software technologies that combine diverse interaction media. In addition to improving access and delivery capabilities, such interfaces enable flexible and personalized dialogs with websites, much like a conversation between humans. In this paper, we present a software framework for multimodal web interaction management that supports mixed-initiative dialogs between users and websites. A mixed-initiative dialog is one where the user and the website take turns changing the flow of interaction. The framework supports the functional specification and realization of such dialogs using staging transformations -a theory for representing and reasoning about dialogs based on partial input. It supports multiple interaction interfaces, and offers sessioning, caching, and co-ordination functions through the use of an interaction manager. Two case studies are presented to illustrate the promise of this approach.
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26-28). Personalization refers to the automatic adjustment of information content, structure, and presentation tailored to an individual user. Commercial Web sites increasingly employ personalization to help retain customers and reduce information overload. For instance, Amazon's ecommerce site is estimated to have at least 23 different types of personalization (J. Riedl, "Personalization and Privacy,"IEEE Internet Computing,Nov.-Dec.2001,pp.29-31). But what does it mean for a Web site to be personalized? Some Web sites, especially e-commerce sites, welcome returning users and remember personal details, such as credit card numbers. Other Web sites track purchase patterns and recommend specific products. Still others provide browsing aids, such as top-10 visited links. A Web site is personalized if a user can interact with the site in an expressive way to achieve his information-seeking goals. Thus, personalizing the user's interaction is the best way to achieve personalization. This approach is complementary to thinking of personalization in terms of content relevance, delivery speed, and qualitative criteria such as utility and customer satisfaction.
Personalization constitutes the mechanisms and technologies necessary to customize information access to the end-user. It can be defined as the automatic adjustment of information content, structure, and presentation tailored to the individual. In this chapter, we study personalization from the viewpoint of personalizing interaction. The survey covers mechanisms for information-finding on the web, advanced information retrieval systems, dialogbased applications, and mobile access paradigms. Specific emphasis is placed on studying how users interact with an information system and how the system can encourage and foster interaction. This helps bring out the role of the personalization system as a facilitator which reconciles the user's mental model with the underlying information system's organization. Three tiers of personalization systems are presented, paying careful attention to interaction considerations. These tiers show how progressive levels of sophistication in interaction can be achieved. The chapter also surveys systems support technologies and niche application domains.
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