Personal Information Management (PIM) refers to the practice and the study of the activities a person performs in order to acquire or create, store, organize, maintain, retrieve, use, and distribute information in each of its many forms (paper and di
gital, in e-mails, files, Web pages, text messages, tweets, posts, etc.) as needed to meet lifes many goals (everyday and long-term, work-related and not) and to fulfill lifes many roles and responsibilities (as parent, spouse, friend, employee, member of community, etc.). PIM activities are an effort to establish, use, and maintain a mapping between information and need. Activities of finding (and re-finding) move from a current need toward information while activities of keeping move from encountered information toward anticipated need. Meta-level activities such as maintaining, organizing, and managing the flow of information focus on the mapping itself. Tools and techniques of PIM can promote information integration with benefits for each kind of PIM activity and across the life cycle of personal information. Understanding how best to accomplish this integration without inadvertently creating problems along the way is a key challenge of PIM.
Web pages contain a large variety of information, but are largely designed for use by graphical web browsers. Mobile access to web-based information often requires presenting HTML web pages using channels that are limited in their graphical capabilit
ies such as small-screens or audio-only interfaces. Content transcoding and annotations have been explored as methods for intelligently presenting HTML documents. Much of this work has focused on transcoding for small-screen devices such as are found on PDAs and cell phones. Here, we focus on the use of annotations and transcoding for presenting HTML content through a voice user interface instantiated in VoiceXML. This transcoded voice interface is designed with an assumption that it will not be used for extended web browsing by voice, but rather to quickly gain directed access to information on web pages. We have found repeated structures that are common in the presentation of data on web pages that are well suited for voice presentation and navigation. In this paper, we describe these structures and their use in an annotation system we have implemented that produces a VoiceXML interface to information originally embedded in HTML documents. We describe the transcoding process used to translate HTML into VoiceXML, including transcoding features we have designed to lead to highly usable VoiceXML code.
We show that partial evaluation can be usefully viewed as a programming model for realizing mixed-initiative functionality in interactive applications. Mixed-initiative interaction between two participants is one where the parties can take turns at a
ny time to change and steer the flow of interaction. We concentrate on the facet of mixed-initiative referred to as `unsolicited reporting and demonstrate how out-of-turn interactions by users can be modeled by `jumping ahead to nested dialogs (via partial evaluation). Our approach permits the view of dialog management systems in terms of their native support for staging and simplifying interactions; we characterize three different voice-based interaction technologies using this viewpoint. In particular, we show that the built-in form interpretation algorithm (FIA) in the VoiceXML dialog management architecture is actually a (well disguised) combination of an interpreter and a partial evaluator.
