Users are individuals: individualizing user models

Abstract

It has long been recognized that in order to build a good system in which a person and a machine cooperate to perform a task it is important to take into account some significant characteristics of people. These characteristics are used to build some kind of a "user model". Traditionally, the model that is built is a model of a canonical (or typical) user. But often individual users vary so much that a model of a canonical user is insufficient. Instead, models of individual users are necessary. This article presents some examples of situations in which individual user models are important. It also presents some techniques that make the construction and use of such models possible. These techniques all reflect a desire to place most of the burden of constructing the models on the system, rather than on the user. This leads to the development of models that are collections of good guesses about the user. Thus some kind of probabilistic reasoning is necessary. And as the models are being used to guide the underlying system, they must also be monitored and updated as suggested by the interactions between the user and the system. The performance of one system that uses some of these techniques is discussed.

Accommodating individual differences in searching a hierarchical file system

“…Finally, there is a problem of conflict. In a review of the literature on individualized software interfaces, Rich (1983) observed that system features that make the task easier for one type of user often make it more difficult for another. One resolution to this problem is to de~iJ~n an adaptive interface that changes itself according to the characteristics of the user.…”

Generic User Modeling Systems

“…User modeling is usually traced back to the works of Allen, Cohen and Perrault (e.g., Perrault et al, 1978;Cohen and Perrault, 1979;Allen, 1979) and Elaine Rich (Rich, 1979a(Rich, , 1979b. For a ten-year period following this seminal research, numerous application systems were developed that collected different types of information about, and exhibited different kinds of adaptation to, their current users.…”

“…Rules can also be de¢ned for inferring individual assumptions about the user from his or her navigation behavior, and for personalizing the content of web pages. The operation of Personalization Server thus follows very much the`stereotype approach' from classical user modeling research (Rich, 1979b;.…”

“…. Information about user groups, either available a priori as stereotypes (e.g., Rich, 1979a;1979b;1981; or dynamically calculated as user group models (e.g. Orwant, 1995;Paliouras et al, 1999), can be maintained with low redundancy.…”

Integrating web service and semantic dialogue model for user models interoperability on the web

“…A statement on a knowledge model may be represented in different ways, for example using conceptual graph (Sowa 1984) like in Dimitrova (2001). We chose a representation by means of linear parameters (Rich 1983) as <property(topic), value, belief >, where property is a feature of the user model (and topic is a concept of the domain model 14 to which the property refers), value indicates the value assumed by the property, belief measures how much the system believes that its assumption about the specific value is correct.…”