Efficient Techniques for Adaptive Hypermedia
Summary (7 min read)
Introduction
- AH systems can be useful in any application area where the system is expected to be used by people with different goals and knowledge and where the hyperspace is reasonably big.
- To make the scope of the review more clear the authors use in this paper the following working definition: by adaptive hypermedia systems they 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.
- Classic loop "user modeling - adaptation" in adaptive systems.
2 Methods and techniques of adaptive hypermedia
- To review AH systems it is first necessary to establish the basis for the classification of adaptive hypermedia methods and techniques .
- The first dimension considered is where adaptive hypermedia systems can be helpful.
- The review identifies several 4 user features which are considered important by existing AH systems and discusses the common ways to represent them (section 4).
- The fourth dimension of classification is the adaptation goals achieved by different methods and techniques: why these methods and techniques are applied, and which problems of the users they can solve.
- The adaptation goals are dependent on application areas.
3 Where and why adaptive hypermedia can be helpful
- 5 The most popular area for adaptive hypermedia research is educational hypermedia.
- Second, novices enter the hyperspace of educational material knowing almost nothing about the subject.
- Users also have different goals when accessing an information system.
- When the goal can not be directly mapped to the structure of the hyperspace or when the hyperspace is large, users need help in navigation and in finding relevant pieces of information.
- IR Hypermedia On-Line Help Systems On-Line Information Systems Educational Hypermedia Institutional Hypermedia Personalized Views in Information Spaces Local Guidance Global Guidance Local Orientation Support Global Orientation Support Managing Personalized Views Application area Size of hyperspace Goals of adaptive navigation support se ar ch w or k Figure 3.
4 Adapting to what?
- The second question to pose when speaking about a particular kind of adaptive system is:.
- Generally, there are many features related to the current context of the user work and to the user as an individual which can betaken into 8 account by an adaptive system.
- So far, this paper identifies five features which are used by existing adaptive hypermedia systems: users' goals, knowledge, background, hyperspace experience, and preferences.
4.1 Knowledge
- User's knowledge of the subject represented in the hyperspace appears to be the most important feature of the user for existing adaptive hypermedia systems.
- User's knowledge of the subject is most often represented by an overlay model (Hypadapter, EPIAIM, KN-AHS, ITEM/PG, ISIS-Tutor, ELM-ART, SHIVA, HyperTutor) which is based on the structural model of the subject domain.
- The concepts are related with each other thus forming a kind of semantic network which represents the structure of the subject domain.
- Sometimes a simpler stereotype user model is used to represent the user's knowledge (Beaumont, 1994; Boyle & Encarnacion, 1994; Hohl, Böcker & Gunzenhäuser, 1996).
- Stereotype model is simpler and less powerful then overlay model but it is also more general and much easier to initialize and to maintain.
4.2 Goals
- Depending on the kind of system, it can be the goal of the work (in application systems), a search goal (in information retrieval systems), and a problemsolving or learning goal (in educational systems).
- In some systems it is reasonable to distinguish local or low-level goals which can change quite often and general or high level goals and tasks which are more stable.
- Almost one third of existing adaptation techniques rely on it.
- More advanced goal-based systems (Encarnação, 1995; Grunst, 1993; Vassileva, 1996) use a more advanced representation of possible goals and current user goals.
4.3 Background and Experience
- Two features of the user which are similar to user's knowledge of the subject but functionally differ from it are user's background and user's experience in the given hyperspace.
- This includes the user's profession, experience of work in related areas, as well as the user's point of view and perspective.
- The systems EPIAIM, C-Book, and Anatom-Tutor include user's background feature in the user model and apply it to adaptive presentation and Adaptive HyperMan applies it to adaptive navigation support.
- Vice versa, the user can be quite familiar with the structure of the hyperspace without deep knowledge of the subject.
- Such individual features of a user as background or experience are usually also modeled by a stereotype user model (MetaDoc, Anatom-Tutor, EPIAIM, C-Book).
4.4 Preferences
- The last, but not the least important feature of the user considered by adaptive hypermedia systems is user's preferences.
- For different reasons the user can prefer some nodes and links over others and some parts of a page over others.
- Unlike other components, the preferences can not be deduced by the system.
- While other parts of the user model are usually represented symbolically, preferences are often represented and calculated numerically by very special ways (Kaplan et al., 1993; Katsumoto et al., 1996; Mathé & Chen, 1996).
5 What can be adapted in adaptive hypermedia?
- Each page contains some local information and a number of links to related pages.
- The authors distinguish content-level and link-level adaptation as two different classes of hypermedia adaptation and call the first one adaptive presentation and the second one adaptive navigation support .
5.1 Adaptive presentation
- A qualified user can be provided with more detailed and deep information while a novice can receive additional explanations.
- This direction of research was influenced by the research on adaptive explanation and adaptive presentation in intelligent systems (Moore & Swartout, 1989; Paris, 1988; Zukerman & McConachy, 1993).
- As the authors will show in the following sections, there are a number of different techniques for adaptive text presentation.
- The authors group these techniques into one single technology because they look very similar from a "what can be adapted" point of view: users with different user models get different texts as a content of the same page.
6 How adaptive hypermedia can help
- In this section the authors consider methods by which adaptive hypermedia systems can help to solve some hypermedia problems and describe the most interesting techniques applied by existing AH systems to implement these methods.
- Since content adaptation techniques and adaptive navigation support techniques are intended to solve different problems the authors consider them separately.
6.1 How content adaptation can help: methods
- Two other methods prerequisite explanations and comparative explanations change the information presented about a concept depending on the user knowledge level of related concepts.
- Another method (the authors call it explanation variants) assumes that showing or hiding some portion of the content is not always sufficient for the adaptation because different users may need essentially different information.
- The system stores several variants for some parts of the page content and the user gets the variant which corresponds to his or her user model.
6.2 How content adaptation can help: techniques
- A simple, but effective technique for content adaptation is the conditional text technique which is used in ITEM/IP (Brusilovsky, 1992b), Lisp-Critic (Fischer et al., 1990), and C-book (Kay & Kummerfeld, 1994b).
- An important feature of the adaptive stretchtext technique is that it lets both the user and the system adapt the content of a particular page and that it can take into account both the knowledge and the preferences of the user.
- A similar technique is used in EPIAIM (de Rosis et al., 1993) and C-book to adapt example presentation to the user background.
- The system stores several variants of explanations for each concept and the user gets the page which includes variants corresponding to his or her knowledge about the concepts presented in the page.
- Special presentation rules are used to decide which slots should be presented to a particular user and in which order.
6.3.1 Global guidance
- Global guidance can be provided in hypermedia systems where users have some "global" information goal (i.e., need information which is contained in one or several nodes somewhere in the hyperspace) and browsing is the way to find the required information.
- The user's information goal which is usually clearly (Kaplan et al., 1993) or partly (Armstrong et al., 1995; Mathé & Chen, 1996) provided by the user is the primary user feature for adaptive guidance.
- A most popular method of providing global guidance in educational hypermedia is direct guidance with the dynamic button "next".
- There are a number of different elaborated techniques which implement this method.
- Second, even for non-contextual links it is not as relevant as in IR hypermedia (where users are mostly professionals) because novices prefer to have a stable order of items (i.e., links) in menus (Debevc et al., 1994; Kaptelinin, 1993).
6.3.2 Local guidance
- The goal of local guidance methods is to help the user to make one navigation step by suggesting the most relevant links to follow from the current node.
- This goal is somewhat similar, but more "modest" than the goal of global guidance.
- They make a suggestion according to the preferences, knowledge, and background of the user whatever is more important for the given application 19 area.
- A relevant method of local guidance for IR hypermedia and on-line information systems is sorting links according to user preferences (Adaptive HyperMan, HYPERFLEX) and background (Adaptive HyperMan).
- The latter method is usually applied to select the most relevant problem from the set of problems available from the current point.
6.3.3 Local orientation support
- The goal of local orientation support methods is to help the user in local orientation (i.e., to help them in understanding what is around and what is his or her relative position in the hyperspace).
- Existing AH systems implement local orientation support by two different ways: providing additional information about the nodes available from the current node (i.e., use of annotation technology) and limiting the number of navigation opportunities to decrease the cognitive overload and let the users concentrate themselves on analyzing the most relevant links (i.e., use of hiding technology).
- First, annotation can be used to show several gradations of link relevancy.
- The second one is providing special annotation for links to not ready to be learned nodes (ITEM/PG and ISIS-Tutor use a kind of dimming and ELM-ART uses "red" traffic light icon).
- The latter examples show that in many 20 cases methods based on the hiding technology also can be implemented with the annotation technology either by outlining the relevant links or by dimming not relevant links.
6.3.4 Global orientation support
- The goal of global orientation support methods is to help the user to understand the structure of the overall hyperspace and his or her absolute position in it.
- In non-adaptive hypermedia, this goal is usually achieved by providing visual landmarks and global maps which can directly help the user in global orientation and by providing guided tours to help the user gradually learn the hyperspace (Linard & Zeiliger, 1995).
- Especially useful here is the method which provides different annotations depending on the user knowledge level (Brusilovsky & Pesin, 1994; Brusilovsky & Zyryanov, 1993; de La Passardiere & Dufresne, 1992; Schwarz et al., 1996).
- In such application areas as educational or institutional hypermedia where the hyperspace is not especially big, hiding can effectively support gradual learning of the hyperspace.
- Another possibility is applying the map adaptation technology (i.e., the adaptive construction of local and global maps where the very structure of the map can depend on the user characteristics).
6.3.5 Managing personalized views
- Managing personalized views is a new goal for adaptive hypermedia systems.
- More advanced systems suggest some more high-level adaptability mechanisms based on metaphors (Waterworth, 1996) and user models (Vassileva, 1996).
- Adaptive solutions, i.e., system supported management of personalized views, are required in WWW-like dynamic information spaces where items can appear, disappear, or evolve.
- BASAR uses intelligent agents to collect and maintain an actual set of links relevant to one of the user's goals.
- The agents can search regularly for new relevant items and identify expired or changed items.
7 User modeling in adaptive hypermedia.
- All previous sections were devoted to the issues related to adaptation techniques in adaptive hypermedia (i.e., techniques which use the student model to provide some kind of adaptation to the user).
- In this chapter the authors will consider some issues related with the first part of this process - the user modeling.
- The authors will not discuss here all issues of user modeling in adaptive hypermedia because most of them are not really specific to adaptive hypermedia (unlike the issues related with adaptation) and have been discussed in a number of other papers on adaptive systems - see (Kobsa, 1993; Kok, 1991) for a comprehensive review.
- The authors outline three stages in the adaptation process : collecting data about the user, processing the data to build or update the user model, and applying the user model to provide the adaptation.
- Almost all of them rely on external sources of information about the user.
7.1 Problems with automatic user modeling in hypermedia systems
- There are some general problems related to automatic user modeling in adaptive systems.
- First, automatic user modeling is not completely reliable.
- At the same time, research on adaptive dialogue systems demonstrates a number of effective technologies of automatic user modeling.
- The user's path itself and patterns of user navigation are an interesting source of information, but it is very hard to update the user model using only this information.
7.2 Additional sources of information for automatic user modeling
- What is similar for the three analyzed approaches is the idea of involving the user in the process of user modeling to get additional information from the user and - as a result - to make user modeling more simple and more reliable.
- To provide adaptation requires more time for the user than to provide feedback, but it is still not very distracting and can be done by a not very skilled user (because the user has to provide just a desired effect, not the changes in the user model).
- Data provided by the user still have to be processed to update the student model, but the amount of information provided is greater and the processing methods can not be as complicated.
8 Concluding remarks
- Adaptive hypermedia is a new but very quickly developing area of research.
- More than 20 truly adaptive hypermedia systems have been developed and described within the last 3 years.
- By now, most existing AH systems are applied in the traditional hypertext and hypermedia areas, such as on-line information systems, on-line help systems, and educational hypermedia.
- The problem is that very few of them have been evaluated by a properly designed experiment.
- The authors should specially mention the paper (Vassileva, 1996) which introduces the idea of "stepwise" adaptation and the papers (Höök et al., 1996; Kay, 1995) which discuss the problems of "transparent" adaptation.
Acknowledgments
- I would like to thank Julita Vassileva, Gerhard Weber, Kristina Höök, Richard Keller and John Eklund for providing comments on the earlier version of this paper.
- Special thanks to Alfred Kobsa for his permanent support in preparing this review.
- I would like to thank also the reviewers of this paper for their useful and constructive comments.
- Part of this work was supported by an Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung Fellowship to the author.
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Frequently Asked Questions (2)
Q2. What future works have the authors mentioned in the paper "Methods and techniques of adaptive hypermedia" ?
The last two technologies are currently under-investigated and need further research. For each of them the authors can name 2-4 papers which are useful as a background for further research but can not be used for providing a comprehensive review. By now, the authors can name only three systems which have been tested by a comprehensive experiment with the number of subjects large enough to get statistically significant data: MetaDoc ( Boyle & Encarnacion, 1994 ), HYPERFLEX ( Kaplan et al., 1993 ), and ISIS-Tutor ( Brusilovsky & Pesin, 1995 ). A promising approach here is to let the user adapt presented hypermedia pages and take the user 's changes into account to update the user model.