Constructing adaptive configuration dialogs using crowd data

As modern software systems grow in size and complexity so do their configuration possibilities. Users are easy to be confused and overwhelmed by the amount of choices they need to make in order to fit their systems to their exact needs. We propose a method to construct adaptive configuration elicitation dialogs through utilizing crowd wisdom. A set of configuration preferences in the form of association rules is first mined from a crowd configuration data set. Possible configuration elicitation dialogs are then modeled through a Markov Decision Process (MDP). Association rules are used to inform the model about configuration decisions that can be automatically inferred from knowledge already elicited earlier in the dialog. This way, an MDP solver can search for elicitation strategies which maximize the expected amount of automated decisions, reducing thereby elicitation effort and increasing user confidence of the result. The method is applied to the privacy configuration of Facebook