Flexing the Interface: The Role of Discourse Knowledge for generating UIs

Abstract

Discourse knowledge has been made explicit for identifying the presentation structure of static documents and User Interfaces (UIs) for multimedia presentations. These interfaces, however, differ from the interfaces for functionalities of an application. Our research investigates the role of discourse knowledge for generating UIs for application functionalities. The UIs should adapt to a change of screen size or user requirements. We have developed a framework that uses both domain and discourse knowledge as well as layout information for generating UIs. This framework has been applied to three use cases in the domain of Human Resources. Each use case represents a single functionality of the application. The process of generating the use cases showed three main findings. The presentation structure of the functionality can be adjusted by the use of discourse knowledge. Additionally, meaningful varying layouts of a single functionality can be generated while preserving the presentation structure. Lastly, discourse knowledge can be used to identify additional information from the functionality that can be hidden if necessary.