WebPersona: a lifelike presentation agent for the World-Wide Web

Rapid growth of competition in the electronic market place will generate a demand for new, innovative communication styles with web users. In this pap er, we develop an operational approach for the automated generation of hype rmedia presentations. Unlike conventional hypermedia, we use a lifelike pre sentation agent which presents the generated material and guides the user t hrough a dynamically expanding navigation space. This approach relies on a model that combines behaviour planning for lifelike characters with concept s from hypermedia authoring such as timeline structures and navigation grap hs. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.