Systems and methods for persistent context-aware guides
Techniques are described that provide a reading pane for reading one or more content portions of a work and a guide pane that displays a structured overview of additional information from the corpus that is focused by an analysis of information from the currently-visible content portion of the work. The contents of the currently-visible content portion displayed within the reading page are used to derive dynamic representations of the user's immediate interests. At the user's request, a structured persistent context-aware guide is computed and displayed. The persistent context-aware guide provides a framework for accessing other parts of the corpus having the most-related information. The elements in the persistent context-aware guide are other content portions or other organizations such as sections, chapters, or articles in the corpus. The persistent context-aware guide may also incorporate additional closely-related information elements from outside the corpus including advertisements. Advertisements for information on the topics of immediate interest to the user can be incorporated within the structured, context-aware guide so that the reader can purchase them and review that information in the context of the current session. The guide pane and the reading pane support navigation controls so that the user can go to new or previous sub-portions of the content portion, new or previous content portions and/or new or previous persistent context-aware guides.
1. A method for creating and using context-aware guides comprising:
displaying, by a computer, a visible content portion from a corpus in a reading pane to a user;
deriving, by the computer, user interest information from the visible content portion;
determining, by the computer, a set of index items based on the corpus by combining a manually generated index with a list of entities extracted from the corpus, paid placement or advertising material, and protected works which are indexed, to obtain a combined list;
lexographically ordering and merging items in the combined list;
determining, by the computer, a set of user interface guide elements for the corpus that correspond to information items from a content portion that includes the visible content portion, wherein the information items from the content portion include annotations indicated by subscripts and are determined using the extracted entities, and wherein the user interface guide elements are based on the combined list;
determining, by the computer based on a degree of semantic overlap, an item of interest by comparing a determined index item to the derived user interest information,
wherein the item of interest comprises information in the reading pane which corresponds to a user interface guide element;
displaying, for a respective information item, an indicator in the reading pane indicating additional costs for accessing associated reference items;
displaying the user interface guide elements and corresponding interesting item indicators as a context-aware guide in a guide pane,
wherein a respective interesting item indicator provides an indicator of how much corpus information is associated with the determined item of interest and further provides fees or costs associated with access to the protected works,
wherein access to a displayed user interface guide element is purchased by selecting the displayed user interface guide element in the context-aware guide,
wherein the user interacts with the displayed user interface guide elements to purchase access to a single page of a work, a section of a work, a chapter, an entire work, and a collection of works, and
wherein a plurality of pages, including at least one recently-visited page and at least one page immediately linked-to by the current page, are used to provide context for creating the context-aware guide;
in response to receiving a request via a displayed user interface guide element to expand the item of interest, updating the context-aware guide displayed in the guide pane to display a new set of user interface guide elements associated with and displayed as sub-entries of the item of interest,
wherein at least one user interface guide element of the new set of user interface guide elements is not displayed in the visible content portion in the reading pane; and responsive to a user navigating to a new document or a new visible content portion, dynamically updating the displayed reading pane and the displayed user interface guide elements in the guide pane based on the user's current location within the new document or the new visible content portion.
2. The method of claim 1 , wherein the corpus comprises at least one of:
pages of a book, web pages, works in a digital library, and works in an information feed.
3. The method of claim 1 , wherein the information items are further determined using topic identification.
4. The method of claim 1 , wherein the set of user interface guide elements for the corpus comprises elements from one or more of: a table of contents, an index, a manually produced index, an automatically produced index, an ontology of extracted entities, and an ontology of topics.
5. The method of claim 1 , wherein determining, the item of interest is further based on a degree of interest, and wherein the degree of interest is based on term-matching.
6. The method of claim 5 , wherein the user interface guide elements include the item of interest and one or more other items of interest, and
wherein displaying the user interface guide elements as the context-aware guide is based on a highest degree of interest associated with the item of interest and the other items of interest.
7. The method of claim 1 , wherein the set of user interface guide elements for the corpus are derived from at least two sources.
8. The method of claim 1 , wherein the context-aware guide is organized as at least one of: a topic map, an index, a tree, and lexicographically ordered sources.
9. The method of claim 1 , wherein the annotations indicate referents of items from the corpus.
10. The method of claim 9 , wherein the annotations are further indicated by a display characteristic.
11. The method of claim 10 , wherein the display characteristic is at least one of: highlights, font effects, subscripts, and superscripts.
12. The method of claim 9 , wherein the annotations are selectable and operable to select associated guide elements for display.
13. The method of claim 9 , wherein reading pane interactions change the displayed context-aware guide.
14. The method of claim 1 , wherein the reading pane contains a set of navigation controls.
15. The method of claim 14 , wherein the navigation controls include at least one of: forward and back navigation controls.
16. The method of claim 1 , wherein the guide pane includes selectable guide elements indicative of relevant corpus items, which are outside the context of the reading pane.
17. The method of claim 16 , wherein the selectable guide elements are operable to adjust the scope of the guide.
18. The method of claim 1 , wherein displayed user interface guide elements which are associated with protected content portions are associated with a cost indicator.
19. The method of claim 18 , wherein the cost indicator is at least one of: a token, a symbol, a word, and a display characteristic.
20. The method of claim 1 , wherein the several pages further include at least one of: adjacent pages in a book, a set of pages that are reached by a short path from the current page, and a set of pages on the same web site as the current page.
21. The method of claim 1 , wherein the context-aware guide indicates which pages in the user interface guide elements were previously visited by the user.
22. A system for providing context-aware guides, comprising:
a processor;
an input/output manager configured to display a visible content portion from a corpus in a reading pane to a user;
a content analysis determination manager configured to derive user interest information from the visible content portion;
a degree of interest determination manager configured to:
determine a set of index items based on the corpus by combining a manually generated index with a list of entities extracted from the corpus, paid placement or advertising material, and protected works which are indexed, to obtain a combined list;
lexographically order and merge items in the combined list; and
determine a set of user interface guide elements for the corpus that correspond to information items from a content portion that includes the visible content portion, wherein the information items from the content portion include annotations indicated by subscripts and are determined using the extracted entities, and wherein the user interface guide elements are based on the combined list;
a persistent guide determination manager configured to determine, based on a degree of semantic overlap, an item of interest by comparing a determined index item to the derived user interest information,
wherein the item of interest comprises information in the reading pane which corresponds to a user interface guide element; and
a display manager configured to:
display, for a respective information item, an indicator in the reading pane indicating additional costs for accessing associated reference items;
display the user interface guide elements and corresponding interesting item indicators as a context-aware guide in a guide pane,
wherein a respective interesting item indicator provides an indicator of how much corpus information is associated with the determined item of interest and further provides fees or costs associated with access to the protected works,
wherein access to a displayed user interface guide element is purchased by selecting the displayed user interface guide element in the context-aware guide,
wherein the user interacts with the displayed user interface guide elements to purchase access to a single page of a work, a section of a work, a chapter, an entire work, and a collection of works, and
wherein a plurality of pages, including at least one recently-visited page and at least one page immediately linked-to by the current page, are used to provide context for creating the context-aware guide;
in response to receiving a request via a displayed user interface guide element to expand the item of interest, update the context aware guide displayed in the guide pane to display a new set of user interface guide elements associated with and displayed as sub-entries of the item of interest,
wherein at least one user interface guide element of the new set of user interface guide elements is not displayed in the visible content portion in the reading pane; and
responsive to a user navigating to a new document or a new visible content portion, dynamically update the displayed reading pane and the displayed user interface guide elements in the guide pane based on the user's current location within the new document or the new visible content portion.
23. A non-transitory computer readable storage medium embedded with instructions that when executed by a computer cause the computer to perform a method, the method comprising:
displaying, by the computer, a visible content portion from a corpus in a reading pane to a user;
deriving, by the computer, user interest information from the visible content portion;
determining, by the computer, a set of index items based on the corpus by combining a manually generated index with a list of entities extracted from the corpus, paid placement or advertising material, and protected works which are indexed, to obtain a combined list;
lexographically ordering and merging items in the combined list;
determining, by the computer a set of user interface guide elements for the corpus that correspond to information items from a content portion that includes the visible content portion, wherein the information items from the content portion include annotations indicated by subscripts and are determined using the extracted entities, and wherein the user interface guide elements are based on the combined list;
determining, by the computer based on a degree of semantic overlap, an item of interest by comparing a determined index item to the derived user interest information,
wherein the item of interest comprises information in the reading pane which corresponds to a user interface guide element;
displaying, for a respective information item, an indicator in the reading pane indicating additional costs for accessing associated reference items;
displaying the user interface guide elements and corresponding interesting item indicators as a context-aware guide in a guide pane,
wherein a respective interesting item indicator provides an indicator of how much corpus information is associated with the determined item of interest and further provides fees or costs associated with access to the protected works,
wherein access to a displayed user interface guide element is purchased by selecting the displayed user interface guide element in the context-aware guide,
wherein the user interacts with the displayed user interface guide elements to purchase access to a single page of a work, a section of a work, a chapter, an entire work, and a collection of works, and
wherein a plurality of pages, including at least one recently-visited page and at least one page immediately linked-to by the current page, are used to provide context for creating the context-aware guide;
in response to receiving a request via a displayed user interface guide element to expand the item of interest, updating the context-aware guide displayed in the guide pane to display a new set of user interface guide elements associated with and displayed as sub-entries of the item of interest,
wherein at least one user interface guide element of the new set of user interface guide elements is not displayed in the visible content portion in the reading pane; and
responsive to a user navigating to a new document or a new visible content portion, dynamically updating the displayed reading pane and the displayed user interface guide elements in the guide pane based on the user's current location within the new document or the new visible content portion.