Evaluation of a personalized digital library based on cognitive styles: Adaptivity vs. adaptability

Personalization can be addressed by adaptability and adaptivity, which have different advantages and disadvantages. This study investigates how digital library users react to these two techniques. More specifically, we develop a personalized digital library to suit the needs of different cognitive styles based on the findings of our previous work (Frias-Martinez, et al., in press). The personalized digital library includes two versions: adaptive version and adaptable version. The results showed that users not only performed better in the adaptive version, but also they perceived more positively to the adaptive version. In addition, cognitive styles have great effects on users’ responses to adaptability and adaptivity. These results provide guidance for designers to select suitable techniques to develop personalized digital libraries

A Review System Based On Product Features In A Mobile Environment

With the rapid growth of the mobile commerce, firms have been trying to get their online channels optimized for the mobile devices. However, many contents on online shopping sites are still focused on a desktop PC environment. Especially, consumer reviews are difficult to browse and grasp via a mobile device. Usually, it is not helpful to simply reduce the size of fonts or photos to fit to mobile devices without a fundamental transformation of the review presentation. In this study, we suggest a feature-based summarization process of consumer reviews in mobile environment. Further, we illustrate an implementation of the process by applying opinion mining techniques to product reviews crawled from a major shopping site in Korean. Finally, a plan for a controlled laboratory experiment is proposed to validate the effectiveness of the suggested review framework in this study

Adaptive hypermedia for education and training

Adaptive hypermedia (AH) is an alternative to the traditional, one-size-fits-all approach in the development of hypermedia systems. AH systems build a model of the goals, preferences, and knowledge of each individual user; this model is used throughout the interaction with the user to adapt to the needs of that particular user (Brusilovsky, 1996b). For example, a student in an adaptive educational hypermedia system will be given a presentation that is adapted specifically to his or her knowledge of the subject (De Bra & Calvi, 1998; Hothi, Hall, & Sly, 2000) as well as a suggested set of the most relevant links to proceed further (Brusilovsky, Eklund, & Schwarz, 1998; Kavcic, 2004). An adaptive electronic encyclopedia will personalize the content of an article to augment the user's existing knowledge and interests (Bontcheva & Wilks, 2005; Milosavljevic, 1997). A museum guide will adapt the presentation about every visited object to the user's individual path through the museum (Oberlander et al., 1998; Stock et al., 2007). Adaptive hypermedia belongs to the class of user-adaptive systems (Schneider-Hufschmidt, Kühme, & Malinowski, 1993). A distinctive feature of an adaptive system is an explicit user model that represents user knowledge, goals, and interests, as well as other features that enable the system to adapt to different users with their own specific set of goals. An adaptive system collects data for the user model from various sources that can include implicitly observing user interaction and explicitly requesting direct input from the user. The user model is applied to provide an adaptation effect, that is, tailor interaction to different users in the same context. In different kinds of adaptive systems, adaptation effects could vary greatly. In AH systems, it is limited to three major adaptation technologies: adaptive content selection, adaptive navigation support, and adaptive presentation. The first of these three technologies comes from the fields of adaptive information retrieval (IR) and intelligent tutoring systems (ITS). When the user searches for information, the system adaptively selects and prioritizes the most relevant items (Brajnik, Guida, & Tasso, 1987; Brusilovsky, 1992b)

Formative E-Assessment of Schema Acquisition in the Human Lexicon as a Tool in Adaptive Online Instruction

This chapter presents a comprehensive method of implementing e-assessment in adaptive e-instruction systems. Specifically, a neural net classifier capable of discerning whether a student has integrated new schema-related concepts from course content into her/his lexicon is used by an expert system with a database containing natural mental representations from course content obtained from students and teachers for adapting e-instruction. Mental representation modeling is used to improve student modeling. Implications for adaptive hypermedia systems and hypertext-based instructions are discussed. Furthermore, it is argued that the current research constitutes a new cognitive science empirical direction to evaluate knowledge acquisition based on meaning information

The impact of user- and system-initiated personalization on the user experience at large sports events

This article describes an experimental study investigating the impact on user experience of two approaches of personalization of content provided on a mobile device, for spectators at large sports events. A lab-based experiment showed that a system-driven approach to personalization was generally preferable, but that there were advantages to retaining some user control over the process. Usability implications for a hybrid approach, and design implications are discussed, with general support for countermeasures designed to overcome recognised limitations of adaptive systems

situ-f: a domain specific language and a first step towards the realization of situ framework

Situ proposes a human centered, dynamic reasoning framework for domain experts to evolve their software. It formally models the relationship between externally observed situation sequences and the rapid evolution of that software system, using real-time usage information from users and contextual capturing on the behavior of a software system relative to its runtime environment. Situf is a continuing effort under Situ framework. In this effort, a domain specific, functional programming language named Situf is presented from its design, semantics and a feasibility test through theoretical validation. The targeted users of this language mainly include domain experts and engineers who are versed in the major concepts and paradigms regarding human-centric situations. As argued there, human-centric situations are vitally important to infer a user\u27s intention and therefore, to drive software service evolution. Situf is designed particularly to encourage domain experts and engineers to think and work with situations. An attribute grammar based approach is developed so that through Situf , relevant real-time contexts can be systematically aggregated around situations. A computational semantics is offered to precisely describe the runtime behavior of a Situf program. While the Situf language serves as the critical centerpiece of this work, its functioning necessarily requires environmental support from Situ elements outside the language itself, such that altogether they give rise to a Situ oriented system. This environment, named Situf -based environment, is also introduced

Flattening methods for adaptive location-based software to user abilities

Individual spatial visualization has been proved to be an important factor that impacts software usage performance, especially on location-based software, which has become a major trend in this ubiquitous computing era. Developing a solution that could enhance a location-based software to handle different users with various levels of spatial visualization abilities could yield improvement in both software usability and user performance. In this dissertation, we started by setting up an hypothesis with a goal to discover the factors that are helpful in minimizing/flattening those differences. Users with various spatial visualization abilities could generate a similar performance on the same software. To test this, we have run experiments to verify this claim. An application used in this study is address verification using location-based software on a portable computing device, which is a professional task used by US census bureau office. We have developed an adaptive location-based software that is able to adapt its user interface in real time according to the user\u27s spatial visualization level

Technologies to enhance self-directed learning from hypertext

With the growing popularity of the World Wide Web, materials presented to learners in the form of hypertext have become a major instructional resource. Despite the potential of hypertext to facilitate access to learning materials, self-directed learning from hypertext is often associated with many concerns. Self-directed learners, due to their different viewpoints, may follow different navigation paths, and thus they will have different interactions with knowledge. Therefore, learners can end up being disoriented or cognitively-overloaded due to the potential gap between what they need and what actually exists on the Web. In addition, while a lot of research has gone into supporting the task of finding web resources, less attention has been paid to the task of supporting the interpretation of Web pages. The inability to interpret the content of pages leads learners to interrupt their current browsing activities to seek help from other human resources or explanatory learning materials. Such activity can weaken learner engagement and lower their motivation to learn. This thesis aims to promote self-directed learning from hypertext resources by proposing solutions to the above problems. It first presents Knowledge Puzzle, a tool that proposes a constructivist approach to learn from the Web. Its main contribution to Web-based learning is that self-directed learners will be able to adapt the path of instruction and the structure of hypertext to their way of thinking, regardless of how the Web content is delivered. This can effectively reduce the gap between what they need and what exists on the Web. SWLinker is another system proposed in this thesis with the aim of supporting the interpretation of Web pages using ontology based semantic annotation. It is an extension to the Internet Explorer Web browser that automatically creates a semantic layer of explanatory information and instructional guidance over Web pages. It also aims to break the conventional view of Web browsing as an individual activity by leveraging the notion of ontology-based collaborative browsing. Both of the tools presented in this thesis were evaluated by students within the context of particular learning tasks. The results show that they effectively fulfilled the intended goals by facilitating learning from hypertext without introducing high overheads in terms of usability or browsing efforts