From Discourse Plans to User-Adapted Hypermedia

. This summary describes how user-adapted hypermedia can be generated from discourse plans; the application domain is that of instruction manuals. 1 Introduction Various methods can be employed to build user-adapted hypermedia (Brusilovsky, 1996). One can start from a maximally connected graph, in which several pages are associated to each node, by defining context-related pages and link selection heuristics. Alternatively, one can employ a knowledge base to generate what is needed in each context. In this paper, we discuss the potential of the discourse plan as a knowledge source in this building process. Discourse planning has proved to be an efficient method for generating user-adapted multimedia. Its application to hypermedia generation is suited to those cases in which knowledge underlying the discourse structure can contribute to making the hyperdocument understandable to the user. We claim that this is the case for educational hypermedia, and in particular for instruction manua..