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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Queries in context: Access to digitized historic documents in a collaboratory for the humanities

2005 , Thiel, U. , Brocks, H. , Dirsch-Weigand, A. , Everts, A. , Frommholz, I. , Stein, A.

In contrast to standard digital libraries, systems addressing the specific requirements of cultural heritage need to deal with digitized material like scanned documents instead of home digital items. Such systems aim at providing the means for domain experts, e.g. historians, to collaboratively work with the given material. To support their work, automatic indexing mechanisms for both textual and pictorial digitized documents need to be combined with retrieval methods exploiting the content as well as the context of information items for precise searches. In the COLLATE project we devised several access methods using textual contents, feature extraction from images, metadata, and annotations provided by the users.

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COLLATE - A collaboratory supporting research on historic European films

2004 , Thiel, U. , Brocks, H. , Frommholz, I. , Dirsch-Weigand, A. , Keiper, J. , Stein, A. , Neuhold, E.J.

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Annotation-based document retrieval with four-valued probabilistic datalog

2004 , Frommholz, I. , Thiel, U. , Kamps, T.

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Can proactive behavior turn chatterbots into conversational agents?

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

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Supporting information access in next generation digital library architectures

2005 , Frommholz, I. , Knezevic, P. , Mehta, B. , Niederée, C. , Risse, T. , Thiel, U.

Current developments on Service-oriented Architectures, Peer-to-Peer and Grid computing promise more open and flexible architectures for digital libraries. They will open the Digital Library (DL) technology to a wider clientele, allow faster adaptability and enable the usage of federative models on content and service provision. These technologies raise new challenges for the realization of DL functionalities, which are rooted in the increased heterogeneity of content, services and metadata, in the higher degree of distribution and dynamics, as well as in the omission of a central control instance. This paper discusses these opportunities and challenges for three central types of DL functionality revolving around information access: metadata management, retrieval functionality, and personalization services.

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Content engineering for conversational advisory systems

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

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Statistical relationship determination in automatic thesaurus construction

2005 , Chen, L. , Fankhauser, P. , Thiel, U. , Kamps, T.

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Agent-based assistance in a digital library user interface

2005 , Thiel, U. , Brocks, H. , Stein, A.

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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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