Presentation Slides Recommender System Design

Abstract: Using presentation software such as PowerPoint or Keynote to sup- port lectures and presentations has become ubiquitous in both academia and industry. However, designing the visuals of presentation slides is a time-consuming and laborious task; repetitive steps are required for selecting templates, organizing objects, and optimizing layouts. To al- leviate these laborious works and to allow users to focus on preparing the contents of presentations, we present SmartPPT, a framework that supports the automatic generation of presentation slides from textual outline. We built a Recommender System model inside the framework that could pick up slide templates for input textual outline. To test its functionality and efficiency, two sets of user study procedures were conducted and shown that SmartPPT is time efficient in generating slides and it outperforms in user satisfaction when compared to user- handcrafted slides and the baseline condition, which was PowerPoint suggested templates.