Welcome to the homepage for the out-of-turn interaction research project. Out-of-turn interaction is a technique for interacting with hierarchical hypermedia which empowers the user to supply information expected by a website before the site requests it. We support and study the functional specification and realization of web dialogs, especially those involving mixed-initiative interaction, through program transformations, such as partial evaluation, currying, and program slicing, and other concepts from programming languages, such as closures and continuations. Below you will find links to software demos, publications, and the webpages of team members.
![]() |
![]() |
Interfaces for Interactive Data Exploration
The following demos permit users to interactively explore the faceted data from the congressional portion of the Project Vote Smart website, which provides information about elected officials in the United States.
These demos require the Mozilla Firefox web
browser (version 2.0 or greater) available here.
Explore the members of the US Congress with
- the Extempore
out-of-turn interaction interface,
- the Extempore
real-time query expansion interface,
- procedural-oriented interfaces (table-based
version, faceted
version, or Extempore
out-of-turn interaction version),
- a generative interface (a-priori version or on-the-fly version).
![]() |
![]() |
Papers published by ACM Press are copyright by the ACM. PDF versions of these papers are posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution.
Perugini, S., Anderson, T.J., & Moroney, W.F. (2007). A Study of Out-of-turn Interaction in Menu-based, IVR, Voicemail Systems. Proceedings of the Twenty-fifth International ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 961-970. Acceptance rate < 25% (= 142/571) [DOI | PDF].
Perugini, S. and Ramakrishnan, N. (2007). Mining Functional Dependencies for Flexible Information Access. Journal of the American Society for Information Science (JASIST), 58(12), 1805-1819. In special issue of JASIST on Mining Web Resources for Enhancing Information Retrieval [DOI | PDF].
Perugini, S. and Ramakrishnan, N. (2006). Interacting with Web Hierarchies. IEEE IT Professional, 8(4), 19-28 [DOI | PDF].
Perugini, S. and Ramakrishnan, N. (2005). A Generative Programming Approach to Interactive Information Retrieval: Insights and Experiences. Proceedings of the Fourth International ACM Conference on Generative Programming and Component Engineering (GPCE), LNCS 3676, 205-220. Acceptance rate = 30% [DOI | PDF].
Narayan, N., Williams, C., Perugini, S., & Ramakrishnan, N. (2004). Staging Transformations for Multimodal Web Interaction Management. Proceedings of the Thirteenth International ACM World Wide Web Conference (WWW), 212-223. Acceptance rate < 15% [DOI | PDF].
Perugini, S. and Ramakrishnan, N. (2003). Personalizing Web Sites with Mixed-Initiative Interaction. IEEE IT Professional, 5(2), 9-15. Featured on the cover of the March-April issue and recognized in ACM TechNews Timely Topics, 5(490), Friday, May 2, 2003 [DOI | PDF].
Perugini, S. McDevitt, K., Richardson, R., Pérez-Quiñones, M.A., Shen, R., Ramakrishnan, N., Williams, C., & Fox, E.A. (2004). Enhancing Usability in CITIDEL: Multimodal, Multilingual, and Interactive Visualization Interfaces. Proceedings of the Fourth International ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), 315-324. Acceptance rate < 25% [DOI | PDF].
Perugini, S. (2006). Real-time Query Expansion and Procedural Interfaces for Information Hierarchies. Proceedings of the International ACM SIGIR Workshop on Faceted Search, Seattle, WA [PDF].
Perugini, S. and Ramakrishnan, N. (2005). Personalization by Program Slicing. Journal of Object Technology, 4(3), 5-11. Special issue: Sixth International ACM GPCE Young Researchers Workshop, Vancouver, Canada, October 2004 [PDF | HTML].
Capra, R., Narayan, M., Perugini, S. Ramakrishnan, N., & Pérez-Quiñones, M.A. (2003). The Staging Transformation Approach to Mixing Initiative. Working Notes of the IJCAI Conference, Workshop on Mixed-Initiative Intelligent Systems, 23-29 [PDF].
Perugini, S., Pinney, M.E., Ramakrishnan, N., Pérez-Quiñones, M.A., and Rosson, M.B. (2003). Taking the Initiative with Extempore: Exploring Out-of-turn Interactions with Faceted Websites (Computing Research Repository Technical Report cs.HC/0312016) [PDF | abstract].
Perugini, S., Ramakrishnan, N., & Fox, E.A. (2004). Automatically Generating Interfaces for Personalized Interaction with Digital Libraries (Computing Research Repository Technical Report cs.DL/0402022) [PDF | abstract].
Ramakrishnan, N. and Perugini, S. (2001). The Partial Evaluation Approach to Information Personalization (Computing Research Repository Technical Report cs.IR/0108003) [PDF | abstract].
Faculty
- Saverio
Perugini (Assistant Professor, Univ of Dayton, Dept
of Computer Science)
- Naren Ramakrishnan (Associate Professor, Virginia Tech, Dept of Computer Science)
- William F. Moroney (Associate Professor, Univ of Dayton, Dept of Psychology)
- Manuel A. Pérez-Quiñones (Associate Professor, Virginia Tech, Dept of Computer Science)
- Ed Fox (Professor, Virginia Tech, Dept of Computer Science)
- Mary Beth Rosson (Professor, Penn State, School of Information Sciences and Technology)
Students
- Travis Suel (BS, Univ of Dayton, Dept of Computer Science, expected Dec 2008)
- Shuangyang Yang (MS, Univ of Dayton, Dept of Electro-optics, expected Dec 2008)
- Matthew Hufford (BS, Univ of Dayton, Dept of Computer Science, expected May 2008)
- Kevin Boschert (BS, Univ of Dayton, Dept of Computer Science, December 2007)
- Michael Narayan (PhD student, Virginia Tech, Dept of Computer Science)
Former student members
- Taylor J. Anderson (MA, Univ of Dayton, Dept of
Psychology, September 2006)
Thesis: A Study of Out-of-turn Interaction with a Voicemail System using Speech Recognition
Now employed at SA Technologies in Marietta, GA.
- Robert J.
Capra (PhD, Virginia Tech, Dept of Computer Science,
February 2006)
Thesis: An Investigation of Finding and Refinding Information on the Web
Now post-doctoral fellow in Gary Marchionini's group in the School of Information and Library Science at the Univ of North Carloina Chapel Hill.
- Chris Williams (MS, Virginia Tech, Dept of Computer
Science, May 2004)
Thesis: WS://IM: A Software Framework for Multimodal Web Interaction Management
Now at Cryptek, Inc. in Sterling, VA.
- Saverio Perugini (PhD, Virginia Tech, Dept of
Computer Science, May 2004)
Thesis: Program Transformations for Information Personalization
Now Assistant Professor at Univ of Dayton, Dept of Computer Science.
- Atul Shenoy (MS, Virginia Tech, Dept of Computer
Science, June 2003)
Thesis: A Software Framework for Out-of-turn Interaction in a Multimodal Web Interface
Now at Microsoft, Inc. in Redmond, WA.
- Kaveh Mehrjoo (BS, Virginia Tech, Dept of Electrical and Computer Engineering, May 2005).
© S. Perugini, Fall 2005, University of Dayton.



