Natural Language Assistant: A Dialog System for Online Product Recommendation

With the emergence of electronic‐commerce systems, successful information access on electronic‐commerce web sites becomes essential. Menu‐driven navigation and keyword search currently provided by most commercial sites have considerable limitations because they tend to overwhelm and frustrate users...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe AI magazine Vol. 23; no. 2; pp. 63 - 75
Main Authors Chai, Joyce, Horvath, Veronika, Nicolov, Nicolas, Stys, Margo, Kambhatla, Nanda, Zadrozny, Wlodek, Melville, Prem
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published La Canada American Association for Artificial Intelligence 01.06.2002
John Wiley & Sons, Inc
Subjects
Access to information
Artificial intelligence
Electronic commerce
Intelligent agents
Keywords
Language
Management
Natural language
Portable computers
Search engines
Telephone banking
User interface
Web sites
Web sites (World Wide Web)
Websites
United States
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Summary:With the emergence of electronic‐commerce systems, successful information access on electronic‐commerce web sites becomes essential. Menu‐driven navigation and keyword search currently provided by most commercial sites have considerable limitations because they tend to overwhelm and frustrate users with lengthy, rigid, and ineffective interactions. To provide an efficient solution for information access, we have built the natural language assistant (nla), a web‐based natural language dialog system to help users find relevant products on electronic‐commerce sites. The system brings together technologies in natural language processing and human‐computer interaction to create a faster and more intuitive way of interacting with web sites. By combining statistical parsing techniques with traditional AI rule‐based technology, we have created a dialog system that accommodates both customer needs and business requirements. The system is currently embedded in an application for recommending laptops and was deployed as a pilot on IBM's web site.
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ISSN:0738-4602
2371-9621
DOI:10.1609/aimag.v23i2.1641