Adaptation To The User's Tasks

Adapting explanations to users with varying background knowledge and abilities is a difficult task: the explanation content, style, amount of details, terms used, etc. may be affected in various ways. We have used our analysis of the information seeking tasks of the users in one particular domain as a basis for adaptation. We structured the domain information into a set of information entities where each entity describes one aspect of a node in the information space. Each information entity is fitted to one or several information seeking tasks, and by combining entities we create an explanation adapted to the user's current task. We do not avoid concepts which are unknown to the user in our information entities. Instead we allow the users to ask follow-up questions on those concepts in order to cater the users' differences in background knowledge. Which follow-up questions are available also depends on the users' current task. Finally, we emphasise the need to make the difference betwe..