Adaptive recognition of implicit structures in human-organized layouts

Card-handling using a hypertext editor can be a powerful methodology for the generation of ideas or understanding complex problems. To support such an activity, recognizing the implicit structure in the arrangement of cards would be useful, but, because the structures to be recognized are by nature ambiguous and highly dependent on user-specific perception, it is difficult for a conventional rule-based spatial parsing algorithm to achieve this task. We propose techniques for building a spatial parser suitable for finding such ambiguous structures based on the mechanics of human perception. Moreover, our parser is adaptively customized to reflect a particular user's preferences through an interactive suggestion process, supported by the application of a genetic algorithm.