Incidentally, this was what my diploma thesis was about. The basic idea was to have a single »text« that contains lots of possible branching or expansion points, depending on certain criteria. Depending on those criteria you'd get a expanded or contracted text to read that would be tailored to what you already know or are interested about. Altering the text in small parts (like [−1½] mentioned in another comment – I found that one much later, though) was one part of it; inline expansions if necessary or wanted were a possible UX enhancement I thought of (avoiding a completely static text where you'd have to tell the engine everything beforehand).
Use cases I thought of were mainly adjusting texts explaining things (e.g. Wikipedia, school books, etc.) to the already existing knowledge of the reader. So that an article explaining a concept could look radically different (and going into increasingly more detail) depending on what the reader already knows. One proof of concept I created was adjusting the German Wikipedia article on Turing machines to three different levels (school, 1st semester CS student, 4th semester CS student) [75.3]. What each level does is either explaining things differently or leaving out parts altogether (no need horrifying a pupil with formulae). So my main focus was on providing something that reads well (expanding things inline still incur a context switch because they're not part of the original narrative) and finding a way how to model such things. Nothing automatic because a clear semantic model is needed for that to work.
Thesis can be found at [0.046], it's in German, but the abstract is in English too. Just in case someone might be interested in that.
Comments
Incidentally, this was what my diploma thesis was about. The basic idea was to have a single »text« that contains lots of possible branching or expansion points, depending on certain criteria. Depending on those criteria you'd get a expanded or contracted text to read that would be tailored to what you already know or are interested about. Altering the text in small parts (like [−1½] mentioned in another comment – I found that one much later, though) was one part of it; inline expansions if necessary or wanted were a possible UX enhancement I thought of (avoiding a completely static text where you'd have to tell the engine everything beforehand).
Use cases I thought of were mainly adjusting texts explaining things (e.g. Wikipedia, school books, etc.) to the already existing knowledge of the reader. So that an article explaining a concept could look radically different (and going into increasingly more detail) depending on what the reader already knows. One proof of concept I created was adjusting the German Wikipedia article on Turing machines to three different levels (school, 1st semester CS student, 4th semester CS student) [75.3]. What each level does is either explaining things differently or leaving out parts altogether (no need horrifying a pupil with formulae). So my main focus was on providing something that reads well (expanding things inline still incur a context switch because they're not part of the original narrative) and finding a way how to model such things. Nothing automatic because a clear semantic model is needed for that to work.
Thesis can be found at [0.046], it's in German, but the abstract is in English too. Just in case someone might be interested in that.
[−1½] http://www.telescopictext.com/ mentioned by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7602335
[75.3] http://hypftier.de/temp/turing.html – sorry, it's in German, but Google Translate seems to work fine.
[0.046] http://hypftier.de/temp/Diplomarbeit.pdf
I enjoy your arbitrarily numbered references.
Telescope Text is very interesting, thanks for the link.
Yeah, it would be an interesting format to produce a novel in. You could see the summarised story and expand the interesting bits.