Rethinking Web interaction

Web sites are evolving into ever more complex distributed applications. But current Web programming tools are not fully adapted to this evolution, and force programmers to worry about too many inessential details. We want to define an alternative programming style better fitted to that kind of applications. To do that, we propose an analysis of Web interaction in order to break it down into very elementary notions, based on semantic criteria instead of technological ones. This allows defining a common vernacular language to describe the concepts of current Web programming tools, but also some other new concepts. This results in a significant gain of expressiveness. The understanding and separation of these notions also makes it possible to get strong static guarantees, that can help a lot during the development of complex applications, for example by making impossible the creation of broken links. Most of the ideas we propose have been implemented in the Ocsigen Web programming framework. We give a quick outline of that implementation

Staging Transformations for Multimodal Web Interaction Management

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.Comment: Describes framework and software architecture for multimodal web interaction managemen

A Generative Programming Approach to Interactive Information Retrieval: Insights and Experiences

We describe the application of generative programming to a problem in interactive information retrieval. The particular interactive information retrieval problem we study is the support for out-of-turn interaction with a website – how a user can communicate input to a website when the site is not soliciting such information on the current page, but will do so on a subsequent page. Our solution approach makes generous use of program transformations (partial evaluation, currying, and slicing) to delay the site’s current solicitation for input until after the user’s out-of-turn input is processed. We illustrate how studying out-of-turn interaction through a generative lens leads to several valuable insights: (i) the concept of a web dialog, (ii) an improved understanding of web taxonomies, and (iii) new web interaction techniques and interfaces. These notions allow us to cast the design of interactive (and responsive) websites in terms of the underlying dialog structure and, further, suggest a simple implementation strategy with a clean separation of concerns. We also highlight new research directions opened up by the generative programming approach to interactive information retrieval such as the idea of web interaction axioms

The Implementation of iData - A Case Study in Generic Programming

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CSE: U: Mixed-initiative Personal Assistant Agents

Specification and implementation of flexible human-computer dialogs is challenging because of the complexity involved in rendering the dialog responsive to a vast number of varied paths through which users might desire to complete the dialog. To address this problem, we developed a toolkit for modeling and implementing task-based, mixed-initiative dialogs based on metaphors from lambda calculus. Our toolkit can automatically operationalize a dialog that involves multiple prompts and/or sub-dialogs, given a high-level dialog specification of it. The use of natural language with the resulting dialogs makes the flexibility in communicating user utterances commensurate with that in dialog completion paths—an aspect missing from commercial assistants like Siri. Our results demonstrate that the dialogs authored with our toolkit support the end user’s completion of a human-computer dialog in a manner that is most natural to them—in a mixed-initiative fashion—that resembles human-human interaction

Scheme 2003: proceedings of the fourth workshop on scheme and functional programming

technical reportThis report contains the papers presented at the Fourth Workshop on Scheme and Functional Programming. The purpose of the Scheme Workshop is to discuss experience with and future developments of the Scheme programming language?including the future of Scheme standardization?as well as general aspects of computer science loosely centered on the general theme of Scheme

A Language-Based Model for Specifying and Staging Mixed-Initiative Dialogs

Specifying and implementing flexible human-computer dialogs, such as those used in kiosks, is complex because of the numerous and varied directions in which each user might steer a dialog. The objective of this research is to improve dialog specification and implementation. To do so we developed a model for specifying and staging mixed-initiative dialogs. The model involves a dialog authoring notation, based on concepts from programming languages, for specifying a variety of unsolicited reporting, mixed-initiative dialogs in a concise representation that serves as a design for dialog implementation. Guided by this foundation, we built a dialog staging engine which operationalizes dialogs specified in this notation. The model, notation, and engine help automate the engineering of mixed-initiative dialog systems. These results also provide a proof-of-concept for dialog specification and implementation from the perspective of theoretical programming languages. The ubiquity of dialogs in domains such as travel, education, and health care with the increased use of interactive voice-response systems and virtual environments provide a fertile landscape for further investigation of these results

Rewriting-based Verification and Debugging of Web Systems

The increasing complexity of Web system has led to the development of sophisticated formal methodologies for verifying and correcting Web data and Web programs. In general, establishing whether a Web system behaves correctly with respect to the original intention of the programmer or checking its internal consistency are non-trivial tasks as witnessed by many studies in the literature. In this dissertation, we face two challenging problems related to the verification of Web systems. Firstly, we extend a previous Web verification framework based on partial rewriting by providing a semi-automatic technique for repairing Web systems. We propose a basic repairing methodology that is endowed with several strategies for optimizing the number of repair actions that must be executed in order to fix a given Web site. Also, we develop an improvement of the Web verification framework that is based on abstract interpretation and greatly enhances both efficiency and scalability of the original technique. Secondly, we formalize a framework for the specification and model-checking of dynamic Web applications that is based on Rewriting Logic. Our framework allows one to simulate the user navigation and the evaluation of Web scripts within a Web application, and also check important related properties such us reachability and consistency. When a property is refuted, a counter-example with the erroneous trace is delivered. Such information can be analyzed in order to debug the Web application under examination by means of a novel backward trace slicing technique that we formulated for this purpose. This technique consists in tracing back, along an execution trace, all the relevant symbols of the term (or state) that we are interested to observe.Romero ., DO. (2011). Rewriting-based Verification and Debugging of Web Systems [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/12496Palanci