English

SummAct: Uncovering User Intentions Through Interactive Behaviour Summarisation

Human-Computer Interaction 2024-10-14 v1

Abstract

Recent work has highlighted the potential of modelling interactive behaviour analogously to natural language. We propose interactive behaviour summarisation as a novel computational task and demonstrate its usefulness for automatically uncovering latent user intentions while interacting with graphical user interfaces. To tackle this task, we introduce SummAct, a novel hierarchical method to summarise low-level input actions into high-level intentions. SummAct first identifies sub-goals from user actions using a large language model and in-context learning. High-level intentions are then obtained by fine-tuning the model using a novel UI element attention to preserve detailed context information embedded within UI elements during summarisation. Through a series of evaluations, we demonstrate that SummAct significantly outperforms baselines across desktop and mobile interfaces as well as interactive tasks by up to 21.9%. We further show three exciting interactive applications benefited from SummAct: interactive behaviour forecasting, automatic behaviour synonym identification, and language-based behaviour retrieval.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2410.08356,
  title  = {SummAct: Uncovering User Intentions Through Interactive Behaviour Summarisation},
  author = {Guanhua Zhang and Mohamed Ahmed and Zhiming Hu and Andreas Bulling},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.08356},
  year   = {2024}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T19:17:06.825Z