Abstract. This paper presents an approach that uses the techniques of plan recognition not only to infer short-term plans and goals, but also to infer the long-term procedural knowledge of a user in a non-binary way. The information about the procedural knowledge in terms of activation builds the user model of AdaptHelp, an adaptive help system for web-based systems. AdaptHelp is based onto established adaptive help systems, which are shortly presented and compared on the used mechanism and techniques.