Creating personalized documents: an optimization approach

ABSTRACT

The digital networked world is enabling and requiring a new emphasis on personalized document creation. The new, more dynamic digital environment demands tools that can reproduce both the contents and the layout automatically, tailored to personal needs and transformed for the presentation device, and can enable novices to easily create such documents. In order to achieve such automated document assembly and transformation, we have formalized custom document creation as a multiobjective optimization problem, and use a genetic algorithm to assemble and transform compound personalized documents. While we have found that such an automated process for document creation opens new possibilities and new workflows, we have also found several areas where further research would enable the approach to be more broadly and practically applied. This paper reviews the current system and outlines several areas where future research will broaden its current capabilities.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
      I.2.1 Applications and Expert Systems
          Subjects: Office automation

Additional Classification:
  F. Theory of Computation
  F.2 ANALYSIS OF ALGORITHMS AND PROBLEM COMPLEXITY
      F.2.2 Nonnumerical Algorithms and Problems
          Subjects: Routing and layout; Sorting and searching

  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.7 DOCUMENT AND TEXT PROCESSING
      I.7.2 Document Preparation
          Subjects: Desktop publishing
      I.7.4 Electronic Publishing

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Experimentation, Performance

Keywords:
automated layout, constrained optimization, constraint-based reasoning, document design, genetic algorithm, multiobjective optimization