Explaining Scenarios for Information Personalization

Abstract

Personalization customizes information access. The PIPE ("Personalization is Partial Evaluation") modeling methodology represents interaction with an information space as a program. The program is then specialized to a user's known interests or information seeking activity by the technique of partial evaluation. In this paper, we elaborate PIPE by considering requirements analysis in the personalization lifecycle. We investigate the use of scenarios as a means of identifying and analyzing personalization requirements. As our first result, we show how designing a PIPE representation can be cast as a search within a space of PIPE models, organized along a partial order. This allows us to view the design of a personalization system, itself, as specialized interpretation of an information space. We then exploit the underlying equivalence of explanation-based generalization (EBG) and partial evaluation to realize high-level goals and needs identified in scenarios; in particular, we specialize (personalize) an information space based on the explanation of a user scenario in that information space, just as EBG specializes a theory based on the explanation of an example in that theory. In this approach, personalization becomes the transformation of information spaces to support the explanation of usage scenarios. An example application is described.