Title: CS3200: Adaptive Hypertext Systems
1CS3200Adaptive Hypertext Systems
Topic 5 User Modelling
- Dr. Christopher Staff
- Department of Computer Science AI
- University of Malta
2Aims and Objectives
- Background to user modelling
- User model implementations
- Types of user model
- Undertanding user behaviour
3Part I Background
4Aims and Objectives
- Adaptive systems in general need to represent the
user in some way so that the system (interface
and/or data) can be adapted to reflect the user's
interests, needs and requirements - The representation of the user is called a user
profile or a user model
5Aims and Objectives
- UM has its roots in philosophy/AI, and the first
implementations were in the field of
natural-language dialogue systems - For adaptive systems, user model must learn (at
least some of the) user requirements/preferences - User models can be simple or complex, but
remember that you can only get out of them what
you put in!
6Uses of user models
- Plan recognition
- Anticipating behaviour/user actions
- User interests
- Information filtering
- User ability
7Why a user model is required in AHS
- A user model is required to adapt hyperspace to
reflect the users preferences, needs and
requirements - The level of adaptation in hypertext systems is
summarised in the following diagram
8(No Transcript)
9Classifications of User Model
- Two main classifications of user model
- Analytical Cognitive
- Empirical Quantitative
- Reference
- G. Brajnik, G. Guida and C. Tasso, User
Modelling in Intelligent Information Retrieval
in Information Processing and Management, Vol.
23, 1987, pp. 305-320
10Empirical Quantitative
- Empirical quantitative models make no effort to
understand or reason about the user - Contain surface knowledge about the user
- Knowledge about the user is taken into
consideration explicitly only during the design
of the system and is then hardwired into the
system (early expert systems) - E.g., models for novice, intermediate, expert
users - Fit the current user into one of the stored models
11Analytical Cognitive
- Try to simulate the cognitive user processes that
are taking place during permanent interaction
with the system - These models incorporate an explicit
representation of the user knowledge - The integration of a knowledge base that stores
user modelling information allows for the
consideration of specific traits of various users
12Taxonomies of User Models
- Rich classifies analytical user models along
three dimensions - Rich, E.A. (1983) 'Users are Individuals
Individualising User Models', in International
Journal of Man-Machine Studies, Volume 18.
(http//www.cs.utexas.edu/users/ear/IJMMS.pdf) - Gloor, P. (1997), Elements of Hypermedia Degisn,
Part I (Structuring Information) Chapter 2 (user
Modeling) Section 1 (Classifications and
Taxonomy). - Section reference http//www.ickn.org/elements/hy
per/cyb13.htm - Book reference http//www.ickn.org/elements/hyper
/hyper.htm
131st Dimension Canonical vs. Individual
- Canonical User Model
- User model caters for one single, typical user
- Individual User Model
- Model tailors its behaviour to many different
users
142nd Explicit Implicit
- Explicit User Model
- User create model himself/herself
- E.g., selecting preferences in a Web portal
- Implicit User Model
- UM built automatically by observing user
behaviour - Makes assumptions about the user
153rd Long-term vs. short-term
- Long-term user models
- Capture and manipulate long term user interests
- Can be many and varied
- Frequently difficult to determine to which
interest the current interest belongs - Info changes slowly over time
163rd Long-term vs. short-term
- Short-term user models
- Attempts to build user model within single
session - Very small amount of time available
- Not necessarily well defined user need
- user might not be familiar with terminology
- Short-term interest can become long term interest
17History of User Modelling
- UM and its history are linked to the history of
user-adaptive systems - Based on the way in which the UM updates its
model of the user, the domain in which it is
used, and the way the interface is caused to
change
18History of User Modelling
- For instance, UM ratings stereotype/probabilis
tic recommender system - UM hypertext adaptation rules AHS
- UM user goals pedagogy adaptation rules
ITS - UM representation, and how it learns about its
users tends to depend on the domain
19History of User Modelling
- Focusing on generic user modelling
- Has its roots in dialogue systems and philosophy
- Need to model the participants to disambiguate
referents, model the participants beliefs, etc. - Early systems (pre-mid-1985) had user modelling
functionality embedded within other system
functionality (e.g., Rich (recommendation
system) Allen, Cohen Perrault (dialogue
processing))
20History of User Modelling
- From 1985, user modelling functionality was
performed in a separate module, but not to
provide user modelling services to arbitrary
systems - So one branch of user modelling focuses on user
modelling shell systems
2001-UMUAI-kobsa (UM history).pdf
21History of User Modelling
- Although UM has its roots in dialogue systems and
philosophy, more progress has been made in
non-natural language systems and interfaces
(PontusJ.pdf) - GUMS (General User Modeling System) first to
separate UM functionality from application - 1986
(Finin)
22History of User Modelling
- GUMS
- Adaptive system developers can define stereotype
hierarchies - Prolog facts describe stereotype membership
requirements - Rules for reasoning about them
23History of User Modelling
- At runtime
- GUMS collects new facts about users using the
application system - Verifies consistency
- Informs application of inconsistencies
- Answers application queries about assumptions
about the user
24History of User Modelling
- Kobsa, 1990, coins User Modeling Shell System
- UMT (Brajnik Tasso, 1994)
- Truth maintenance system
- Uses stereotypes
- Can retract assumptions made about users
25History of User Modelling
- BGP-MS (Kobsa Pohl, 1995)
- Beliefs, Goals, and Plans - Maintenance System
- Stereotypes, but stored and managed using
first-order predicate logic and terminological
logic - Can be used as multi-user, multi-application
network server
26History of User Modelling
- Doppelgänger (Orwant, 1995)
- Info about user provided via multi-modal user
interface - User model that can be inspected and edited by
user
27History of User Modelling
- TAGUS (Paiva Self, 1995)
- Also has diagnostic subsystem and library of
misconceptions - Predicts user behaviour and self-diagnoses
unexpected behaviour - um (Kay, 1995)
- Uses attribute-value pairs to represent user
- Stores evidence for its assumptions
28History of User Modelling
- From 1998 and with the popularisation of the Web,
web personalisation grew in the areas of targeted
advertising, product recommendations,
personalised news, portals, adaptive hypertext
systems, etc.
29Part II UM Implementations
30What might we store in a UM?
- Personal characteristics
- General interests and preferences
- Proficiencies
- Non-cognitive abilities
- Current goals and plans
- Specific beliefs and knowledge
- Behavioural regularities
- Psychological states
- Context of the interaction
- Interaction history
PontusJ.pdf, ijcai01-tutorial-jameson.pdf
31From where might we get input?
- Self-reports on personal characteristics
- Self-reports on proficiencies and interests
- Evaluations of specific objects
- Responses to test items
- Naturally occurring actions
- Low-level measures of psychological states
- Low-level measures of context
- Vision and gaze tracking
ijcai01-tutorial-jameson.pdf
32Techniques for constructing UMs
- Attribute-Value Pairs
- Machine learning techniques Bayesian
(probabilistic) - Logic-based (e.g.inference techniques or
algorithms) - Stereotype-based
- Inference rules
kules.pdf
33Attribute-Value Pairs
- e.g., ah2002AHA.pdf
- The representation of the user and of the domain
are inextricably linked - What we want to do is capture the degree to
which a user knows or is interested in some
concept - We can then use simple or complex rules to update
the UM and to adapt the interface
34Attribute-Value Pairs
- Particularly useful for showing (simple)
dependencies between concepts - Complex ones harder to update
- Can use IF-THEN-ELSE rules to trigger events
- Such as updating a user model
- Modifying the contents of a document (AHA!,
MetaDoc) - Changing the visibility or viability of links
35Overview of AHA!
- Adaptive Hypertext for All!
- Each time user visits a page, a set of rules
determines how the user model is updated - Inclusion rules determine the fragments in the
current page that will be displayed to the user
(adaptive presentation) - Requirement rules change link colours to indicate
the desirability of each link (adaptive
navigation)
36Attribute-Value Pairs
- From where do the attributes come?
- Need to be meaningful in the domain (domain
modelling) - Can be concepts (conceptual modelling)
- Can be terms that occur in documents (IR)
37Attribute-Value Pairs
- What do values represent?
- Degrees of interest, knowledge, familiarity, ...
- Skill level, proficiency, competence
- Facts (usually as strings, rather than numerical
values) - Truth or falsehood (boolean)
38Simple Bayesian Classifier
- Rather than pre-determining which concepts, etc.,
to model, let features be selected based on
observation - SBCs are also used in machine learning approaches
to user modeling - Instead of working with predetermined sets of
models, learn interests of current user
ProbUserModel.pdf
39Simple Bayesian Classifier
- Lets say we want to determine if a document is
likely to be interesting to a user - We need some prior examples of interesting and
non-interesting documents - Automatically select document features
- Usually terms of high frequency
- Assign boolean values to terms in vectors
- To indicate presence in or absence from document
40Simple Bayesian Classifier
- Now, for an arbitrary document, we want to
determine the probability that the document is
interesting to the user - P(classj word1 word2 ... wordk)
- Assuming term independence, the probability that
an example belongs to classj is proportional to
41Syskill Webert
- Learns simple Baysian classifier from user
interaction - User identifies his/her topic of interest
- As user browses, rates web pages as hot or
cold - S W learns users interests to mark up links,
and to construct search engine query
webb-umuai-2001.pdf, ProbUserModel.pdf
42Syskill Webert
- Text is converted to feature vectors (term
vectors) for SBC - Terms used are those identified as being most
informative words in current set of pages - based on the expected ability to classify
document if the word is absent from doc
43Simple Bayesian Classifier
- Of course, the term independence assumption is
unrealistic, but SBC still works well - Algorithm is fast, so can be used to update user
model in real time - Can be modified to support ranking according to
degree of probability, rather than boolean
44Simple Bayesian Classifier
- Needs to be trained, usually using small data
sets - Works by multiplying probability estimates to
obtain joint probabilities - If any is zero, results will be zero...
- Can use small constant e (0.001) instead
(estimation bias) ...
45Personal WebWatcher
- Predicting interesting hyperlinks from the set of
documents visited by a user - Followed links are positive examples of user
interests - Ignored links are negative examples of user
interests - Use descriptions of hyperlinks as shortened
documents rather than full docs
pwwTR.pdf
46Personal WebWatcher
- Also uses a simple bayesian classifier to
recommend interesting links - where
- TF(w, c) is term frequency of term w in document
of class c (e.g., interesting/non-interesting),
and TF(w, doc) is frequency of term w in document
doc
47Personal WebWatcher
- Training set is set of documents that user has
seen and user could have seen but has ignored - Uses short description of document, rather than
document vector itself
48Logic-based
- Does a UM only contain facts about a users
knowledge? - Can we also represent assumptions, and
assumptions about beliefs? - Assumptions are contextualised, and represented
using modal logic (ATac, or assumption
typeassumption content)
pohl1999-logic-based.pdf
49Logic-based
- We can also partition assumptions about the user
50Logic-based
- Advantage is that beliefs, assumptions, facts are
already in logical representation - Makes it easier to draw conclusions about the
user from the stored knowledge
51Stereotype-based
- Originally proposed by Rich in 1979
- Captures default information about groups of
users - Tends not to be used anymore
1993-aui-kobsa.pdf
52Stereotype-based
- Kobsa points out that developer of stereotypes
needs to fulfil three tasks - Identify user subgroups
- Identify key characteristics of typical user in
subgroup - So that new user may be automatically classified
- Represent hierarchically ordered stereotypes
- Fine-grained vs. coarse-grained
53Inference rules
- e.g., C-Tutor, avanti.pdf
- May use production rules to make inferences about
user - Also, to update system about changes in user
state or user knowledge - Note that Pohl points out that all user models
(that learn about the user) must infer
assumptions about the user (pohl1999-logic-based.p
df)
54Adaptive Hypertext Systems
- By adaptive hypermedia we mean all hypertext
and hypermedia systems which reflect some
features of the user in the user model and apply
this model to adapt various visible aspects of
the system to the user - Brusilovsky, P. (1996). Methods and techniques of
adaptive hypermedia, in User Modeling and
User-Adapted Interaction 6 (2-3), pp. 87-129.
Available on-line at http//www.contrib.andrew.cm
u.edu/plb/UMUAI.ps
55Adapted from Horgen, S.A., 2002, "A Domain Model
for an Adaptive Hypertext System based on HTML",
MSc Thesis, Chapter 4 (Adaptivity), pg. 32.
Available on-line from http//www.aitel.hist.no/s
vendah/ahs.html (iui.pdf)
56Conclusion
- User Models can represent user beliefs,
preferences, interests, proficiencies, attitudes,
goals - User models are used in AHS to modify hyperspace
- In IR to select better (more relevant) documents
- More likely to use analytical cognitive model,
but can still use simple models
57Part III Types of UM
58Types of User Models
- User Models have their roots in philosophy and
learning - Student models assumed to be some subset of the
knowledge about the domain to be learnt - Consequently, the types of user model have been
heavily influenced by this
59Student Models
- Student Models are used, e.g., in Intelligent
Tutoring Systems (ITSs) - In ITS we know user goals, and may be able to
identify user plans - The domain/experts knowledge must be well
understood - Assumption that user wants to acquire experts
knowledge - Plan means moving from users current state to
state that user wants to achieve
60Student Models
- If we assume that experts knowledge is
transferable to student, then students knowledge
includes some of the experts knowledge - Overlay, differential, perturbation models (from
neena_albi_honours.pdf p25-)
61Overlay Models
- SCHOLAR (Carbonell, 1970)
- Simplest of the student models
- Student knowledge (K) is a subset of experts
- Assumes that K missing from student model is not
known by the student - But what if student has incorrectly learnt K?
62Overlay Models
- Good when subject matter can be represented as
prerequisite hierarchy - K remaining to be acquired by student is exactly
difference between expert K and student K - Cannot represent/infer student misconceptions
63Differential Models
- WEST (Burton Brown, 1989)
- Compares student/expert performance in execution
of current task - Divides K into K the student should know (because
it has already been presented) and K the student
cannot be expected to know (yet)
64Differential Models
- Still assumes that students K is subset of
experts - But can differentiate between K that has been
presented but not understood and K that has not
yet been presented
65Perturbation Models
- LMS (Sleeman Smith, 1981)
- Combines overlay model with representation of
faulty knowledge - Bug library
- Attempts to understand why student failed to
complete task correctly - Permits student model to contain K not present in
experts K
66Part IV Understanding user behaviour
67Making assumptions about users
- Browsing behaviour
- What does a users browsing behaviour tell us
about the user?
68Making assumptions about users
- Searle (1969)... when a speech act is performed
certain presuppositions must have been valid for
the speaker to perform the speech act correctly
(from 1995-UMUAI-kobsa.pdf, 1995-COOP95-kobsa.pdf)
69Making assumptions about users
- If the user requests an explanation, a graphic,
an example or a glossary definition for a
hotword, then he is assumed to be unfamiliar with
this hotword.
1996-kobsa.pdf
70Making assumptions about users
- If the user unselects an explanation, a graphic,
an example or a glossary definition for a
hotword, then he is assumed to be familiar with
this hotword.
1996-kobsa.pdf
71Making assumptions about users
- If the user requests additional details for a
hotword, then he is assumed to be familiar with
this hotword.
1996-kobsa.pdf
72User Actions in Hypertext
- Actions that can be performed in hypertext
- Follow link
- Dont follow link
- Print
- Bookmark
- Go to bookmark
- Backup
- Go to URL
- ...
73Understanding Browsing Behaviour
- What might each of these actions mean?
- Can we relate them to Kobsas assumptions?
- Do we need link analysis first?
74Identifying Browsing Behaviour
- Lost in Hyperspace (otter2000.pdf)
- Honing in on information
- Needing more help/information
- Being un/familiar with topic/web space
- Interested in topic
- Uninterested in topic
- Changing topic
75Identifying Browsing Behaviour
- Search browsing
- General Purpose Browsing
- The serendipitous user
catledge95.pdf
76Understanding Browsing Behaviour
- How can understanding browsing behaviour help us
create better adaptive hypertext systems? - Less intrusive
- Just-in-Time support
- Dont give more info when it is not
required/wanted - Efficient use of resources
77Conclusions
- The ability to model the user allows reasoning
about the user to tailor an interaction to the
users needs and requirements... - ... especially when the user is unable to
describe what it is they need - Tightly bound to domain/expert knowledge
78Conclusions
- Significant efforts to decouple the user model
from the application - May be too expensive to accurately model all
domains, and in any case, goal of many adaptive
systems is not to help user become expert, but to
provide timely assistance at the right level of
detail