An Intelligent Framework for Auto-filling Web Forms from Different Web Applications

Abstract

Nowadays, people use on-line services to conduct various tasks such as on-line shopping and holiday trip planning using web applications. Generally users are required to enter information into web forms to interact with the web applications. However they often have to type in the same information to different web applications repetitively. It could be a tedious job for a user to fill in a large amount of web forms with the same information. To save users from typing redundant information, it is critical to propagate and pre-fill the user's previous inputs across different web applications. However, existing software and approaches cannot meet this urgent need. In this position paper, we propose an intelligent framework to propagate user's inputs across different web applications. Our framework collects user's inputs and analyzes the patterns of user's usage. Furthermore it detects the changes of user's contexts by extracting user's contextual information from various sources such as a user's calender. Our framework clusters the user interface (UI) components to form semantic groups of similar UI components based on our proposed clustering approach. Knowing the similarity relation between UI components, the framework can pre-fill the web forms with user's previous inputs. We conduct a preliminary study on effectiveness of our proposed clustering approach. We achieved a precision of 80% and a recall of 87%.