Fraunhofer Institut für Integrierte Publikations-und Informationssysteme IPSI

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The layer-seeds term clustering method: Enabling proactive situation-aware product recommendations in e-commerce dialogues

2005 , Chen, L. , L'Abbate, M. , Thiel, U. , Neuhold, E.J.

In e-commerce it is often crucial to provide customers a large choice of relevant offers. Users, however, seldom provides complete and comprehensive descriptions of their desires, therefore user interfaces are needed that can generate automatically expanded queries to the product database and proactively enrich the ongoing dialogue with recommendations of suitable products. Automatic query expansion is mostly based on thesaurus and/or user profiles. In e-commerce applications, specific thesauri reflecting the webstore's product categories are desirable. This work describes a method for the automatic construction of a thesaurus based on existing categories of documents. A clustering algorithm, the "Layer-Seeds method", is introduced, which facilitates the automatic generation of thesaurus reflecting the specific vocabulary occurring in a given collection of documents. The clustering works on terms extracted from the documents in a certain category and organizes them in a tree-like hierarchical structure-a thesaurus. The thesaurus is then employed for automatic query expansion in an e-commerce application in order to obtain better results for product searching. Experiments yield evidence that a significant increase of user satisfaction is achieved.

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Using case based retrieval techniques for handling anomalous situations in advisory dialogues

2004 , L'Abbate, M. , Frommholz, I. , Thiel, U. , Neuhold, E.

The efficacy of expert systems often depends on the accuracy and completeness of the problem specification negotiated with the user. Therefore, efficient user interfaces are needed, in order to assist the user in identifying and supplying the required data. Our approach presented in this paper is based on the utilisation of conversational interfaces, giving users the possibility of interacting with the system by means of natural language. Through the use of flexible dialogue management plans and an advanced problem solving strategy based on case based reasoning and information retrieval, efficient user guidance during the interaction with an expert system can be achieved. Thus, the user can interactively develop a comprehensive and coherent specification of his problem, based on clarifications, explanations, and context-based factual information provided by the system. As an application framework we introduce the EU-funded Project VIP-Advisor whose objective is the development of a virtual insurance and finance assistant capable of natural language interaction.

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The use of contextual information in a proactivity model for conversational agents

2003 , L'Abbate, M. , Thiel, U.

For conversational agents engaging in a natural language-based interaction with web site users in service exchange applications, simple entertaining "chatting" is not sufficient. Instead, the agent needs to be cooperative by trying to provide relevant information about products and/or the conditions of purchasing. In this paper we analyze how the proactive behaviour of conversational agents can be used to increase the general user satisfaction. The results of two case studies allow us to outline a generic proactivity, model for information agents based on retrieval mechanisms and search heuristics.

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Helping conversational agents to find informative responses

2002 , L'Abbate, M. , Thiel, U.

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Can proactive behavior turn chatterbots into conversational agents?

2005 , L'Abbate, M. , Thiel, U. , Kamps, T.

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Publication

Beratungsdialog im WWW: Ein konversationales Modell und seine Implementierung

2004 , Engelmann, H. , L'Abbate, M. , Thiel, U.

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A personalized information search process based on dialoguing agents and user profiling

2003 , Semeraro, G. , Degemmis, M. , Lops, P. , Thiel, U. , L'Abbate, M.

The amount of information available on the web, as well as the number of e-businesses and web shoppers, is growing exponentially. Customers have to spend a lot of time to browse the net in order to find relevant information. One way to overcome this problem is to use dialoguing agents that exploit user profiles to generate personal recommendations. This paper presents a system, designed according to this approach, that adopts a query refinement mechanism to improve the search process of an Internet commerce web site.

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Content engineering for conversational advisory systems

2004 , L'Abbate, M. , Thiel, U. , Kamps, T.

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Increasing the customer's choice: query expansion based on the layer-seeds method and its application in e-commerce

2004 , Chen, L. , L'Abbate, M. , Thiel, U. , Neuhold, E.J.

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Automatische Thesauruserstellung und Query Expansion in einer E-Commerce-Anwendung

2002 , Chen, L. , Thiel, U. , L'Abbate, M.

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