Automatic Generation of the Behavior of a User Interface from a High-Level Discourse Model

Abstract

In addition to the structure and "look" of a user interface (UI), its behavior needs to be defined. For a fully automated UI generation, of course, it will have to be generated fully automatically as well. We avoid that finite-state machines or similar would have to be created manually by a UI designer. Instead, we start from a largely declarative high-level discourse model including a few procedural constructs. Based on our definitions of the procedural semantics of all parts of such a discourse model, we are able to automatically generate a finite-state machine that fully defines the behavior of the generated UI. In this way, we show how automatic generation of the behavior of a user interface is possible from a high-level discourse model.