A Multicriteria Approach To Dynamic Reasoning In An Intelligent User Interface

This paper presents the way that the global efficiencies approach has been applied to improve the dynamic reasoning of an intelligent Graphical User Interface (GUI) that is based on the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The GUI provides intelligent help to users during their interaction with an e-mailing system, which is called IMailer. For this purpose, I-Mailer constantly reasons about every user action in terms of the user’s goals and plans. In case the user is involved in a problematic situation, it transforms the user’s problematic action and generates alternative actions to be suggested to the user. The actions suggested should be better than the problematic one in the context of the user’s intentions as these are hypothesized by the system. Therefore, DEA is used in order to categorize the candidate alternative actions to be suggested to the user into dominating and dominated ones. However, this process usually results in the production of many alternative actions that could be suggested to the user instead of the one issued. To solve this problem, we have applied the global efficiencies approach to discriminate further among the DEA-efficient alternative actions and select the best alternative action to be suggested to a user. Finally, the system has been evaluated as to the effectiveness of this approach.