Responsive information architect: Enabling context-sensitive information seeking

Information seeking is an important but often difficult task especially when involving large and complex data sets. We hypothesize that a context-sensitive interaction paradigm can greatly assist users in their information seeking. Such a paradigm allows a system to both understand user data requests and present the requested information in context. Driven by this hypothesis, we have developed a suite of intelligent user interaction technologies and integrated them in a full-fledged, context-sensitive information system. In this paper, we review two sets of key technologies: context-sensitive multimodal input interpretation and automated multimedia output generation. We also share our evaluation results, which indicate that our approaches are capable of supporting context-sensitive information seeking for practical applications. Copyright 2006, American Association for Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.