A Response to the Need for Summary Responses

In this paper we argue that natural language inter- faces to databases should be able to produce summary responses as well as listing actual data. We describe a system (incorporating a number of heuristics and a knowledge base built on top of the database) that has been developed to generate such summary responses. It is largely domain-independent, has been tested on many examples, and handles a wide variety of situa- tions where summary responses would be useful

User modeling, adaptation, and personalization : 17th international conference, UMAP 2009, formerly UM and AH, Trento, Italy, June 22-26, 2009 : proceedings

The First International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization (UMAP 2009) was held June 22-26, 2009, in Trento, Italy. UMAP 2009 was not, however, the first conference on user modeling or adaptation. In fact, UMAP 2009 merged two vigorous biennial conference traditions - the User Modeling (UM) conference series and the Adaptive Hypermedia (AH) conference series–into one annual conference that is now the premier venue for research into all aspects of user modeling, adaptation and personalization. Hence UMAP 2009 was the 17th international conference on this subject, not the first. A companion foreword provides more insight into the rationale for integrating these two conference series and discusses the goals of the new merged conference. For our part, as Program and General Chairs for UMAP 2009, we chose a diverse Program Committee (PC) to adjudicate the submissions to the Research Track. The PC members were selected from established leaders in both the AH and UM communities, as well as highly up-and-coming newer researchers. Each paper was reviewed by at least three PC members, and typically a fourth PC member acted as both reviewer and meta-reviewer to ensure full discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the paper and to make sure that consistent and constructive feedback was provided to the authors. Papers were submitted in two categories: full and short. Full papers describe mature work in detail (up to 12 pages were allowed) and short papers describe new and promising research of interest to the community (up to 6 pages were allowed). For the Research Track there were 125 submissions: 88 full papers and 37 short papers. Twenty-three of the full papers were accepted for oral presentation, as were six of the short papers. In addition, 18 papers (full and short) were accepted for poster presentation at the conference. This meant that 26.1% of the 88 papers submitted as full papers were accepted for full presentation, and 37.6% of the 125 overall submissions were accepted in some form. In addition to the Research Track, UMAP 2009 also established an Industry Track, chaired by Peter Brusilovsky and Alejandro Jaimes. The Industry Track had its own Program Committee of internationally renowned researchers and practitioners. The Industry Track is an important acknowledgement of the increasing impact of UMAP research on many areas of application, as personalization and adaptation become key elements of many deployed software systems. Papers submitted to the Industry Track were reviewed by at least three members of the Industry Track PC to ensure both that they met high standards for UMAP research and that they were relevant to application. Overall, there were 12 papers submitted to the Industry Track, with 3 accepted for oral presentation and 1 accepted for poster presentation. UMAP 2009 also had a Doctoral Consortium, chaired by Sandra Carberry, Brent Martin and Riichiro Mizoguchi, to provide constructive feedback to young VIII Preface researchers. An exciting set of workshops and two informative tutorials were selected by a committee chaired by Milos Kravcik and Antonio Kr¨uger. The tutorials were: – Constraint-Based Tutoring Systems, by Antonija Mitrovic and Stellan Ohlsson; – New Paradigms for Adaptive Interaction, by Krzysztof Gajos and Anthony Jameson. The workshops were: – Adaptation and Personalization for Web 2.0, organized by Carlo Tasso, Antonina Dattolo, Rosta Farzan, Styliani Kleanthous, David Bueno Vallejo, and Julita Vassileva; – Lifelong User Modelling, organized by Judy Kay and Bob Kummerfeld; – Personalization in Mobile and Pervasive Computing, organized by Doreen Cheng, Kinshuk, Alfred Kobsa, Kurt Partridge, and Zhiwen Yu; – Ubiquitous User Modeling, organized by Shlomo Berkovsky, Francesca Carmagnola, Dominikus Heckmann, and Tsvi Kuflik; – User-Centered Design and Evaluation of Adaptive Systems, organized by Stephan Weibelzahl, Judith Masthoff, Alexandros Paramythis, and Lex van Velsen. In addition to all of these events, UMAP 2009 had three keynote speakers: – Susan Dumais, Microsoft Research: Thinking Outside the (Search) Box – Alessandro Vinciarelli, Idiap Research Institute: Social Computers for the Social Animal. State-of-the-Art and Future Perspectives of Social Signal Processing – Vincent Wade, Trinity College Dublin: Challenges for the Multi-Dimensional Personalized Web We would like to thank the many people throughout the worldwide UMAP community who helped in putting on UMAP 2009. We deeply appreciate the hard work of the chairs responsible for the Industry Track, the Doctoral Consortium, the Workshops, Tutorials, and Demonstrations, and the conference publicity, as well as the conscientious work of the Program Committee members and the additional reviewers. We also gratefully acknowledge our sponsors who helped provide funding and organizational expertise: User Modeling Inc., Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK-irst), the U.S. National Science Foundation, Microsoft Research and the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence. Finally, we want to acknowledge the use of EasyChair for management of the review process and the preparation of the proceedings