Personalized Shopping via Conversational User Interface

Online and offline shopping activity often requires shoppers to spend substantial amounts of time researching, finding, and refining their product search to identify the right product that meets their requirements. Some of this time may be spent in searching and filtering results on general-purpose search engines or merchant websites, neither of which are optimized for shopping related research. This disclosure describes techniques that enable shopping via a rich, multimedia conversational interface. The techniques provide an online shopping experience that is simple, uncluttered, and does not overwhelm the user. The user is provided guidance throughout their shopping journey

Enabling Proactive Adaptation through Just-in-time Testing of Conversational Services

Service-based applications (SBAs) will increasingly be composed of third-party services available over the Internet. Reacting to failures of those third-party services by dynamically adapting the SBAs will become a key enabler for ensuring reliability. Determining when to adapt an SBA is especially challenging in the presence of conversational (aka. stateful) services. A conversational service might fail in the middle of an invocation sequence, in which case adapting the SBA might be costly; e.g., due to the necessary state transfer to an alternative service. In this paper we propose just-in-time testing of conversational services as a novel approach to detect potential problems and to proactively trigger adaptations, thereby preventing costly compensation activities. The approach is based on a framework for online testing and a formal test-generation method which guarantees functional correctness for conversational services. The applicability of the approach is discussed with respect to its underlying assumptions and its performance. The benefits of the approach are demonstrated using a realistic example

A Recipe Based On-line Food Store

In this paper we present a recommender system design for recipe based on-line food shopping. Our system differs in two major ways from existing system. First we use an editor that labels clusters of users, such as meat lovers and vegetarians; based on what recipes they have chosen. Secondly, these clusters are available to users, so they can not only choose recipes based on their own user group but also navigate among other user groups

Towards Question-based Recommender Systems

Conversational and question-based recommender systems have gained increasing attention in recent years, with users enabled to converse with the system and better control recommendations. Nevertheless, research in the field is still limited, compared to traditional recommender systems. In this work, we propose a novel Question-based recommendation method, Qrec, to assist users to find items interactively, by answering automatically constructed and algorithmically chosen questions. Previous conversational recommender systems ask users to express their preferences over items or item facets. Our model, instead, asks users to express their preferences over descriptive item features. The model is first trained offline by a novel matrix factorization algorithm, and then iteratively updates the user and item latent factors online by a closed-form solution based on the user answers. Meanwhile, our model infers the underlying user belief and preferences over items to learn an optimal question-asking strategy by using Generalized Binary Search, so as to ask a sequence of questions to the user. Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed matrix factorization model outperforms the traditional Probabilistic Matrix Factorization model. Further, our proposed Qrec model can greatly improve the performance of state-of-the-art baselines, and it is also effective in the case of cold-start user and item recommendations.Comment: accepted by SIGIR 202

Versioning RLOs as ‘study skills toolkits’ for different user groups and developing community tools to support sharing and customisation

As patterns of need in twenty-first century higher education change so must the solutions. E-learning solutions, in particular, need to be adaptive to fit a range of teaching and learning situations. eLanguages, a research and development unit at the University of Southampton, develops online toolkits of reusable learning objects (RLOs) in Study Skills that can be versioned for different student user groups. Underpinning them is an approach which seeks to deliver high quality content and be cost-effective. Reusability and versatility are central to this. With the creation of a large base of RLOs has come recognition of the need to manage and customise these resources easily and a suite of tools enabling such actions has been developed. This paper will present the toolkits and the pedagogic design of the RLOs. The web-based tools to support management and customisation of RLOs, and potentially facilitate new toolkit creation, will also be introduced

Shopbot: An Image Based Search Application for E-Commerce Domain

For the past few years, e-commerce has changed the way people buy and sell products. People use this business model to do business over the Internet. In this domain, Human-Computer Interaction has been gaining momentum. Lately, there has been an upsurge in agent based applications in the form of intelligent personal assistants (also known as Chatbots) which make it easier for users to interact with digital services via a conversation, in the same way we talk to humans. In e- commerce, these assistants offer mainly text-based or speech based search capabilities. They can handle search for most products, but cannot handle search that is based on product features, for instance color or pattern of a T-shirt. Most of the times, it is difficult for users to define these characteristics while searching for a product. Furthermore, a growing number of consumers rely on social media to make a purchasing decision. They try to find out what is trending right now and look for similar items. This brings us the need of a virtual shopping assistant or a shopbot which recommends products based on an image of the product provided by a user. It will be designed to provide relevant responses to the user queries by performing image recognition. This report explains the proposed approach along with the implementation for the virtual shopping assistant

Shopbot: An Image Based Search Application for E-Commerce Domain

For the past few years, e-commerce has changed the way people buy and sell products. People use this business model to do business over the Internet. In this domain, Human-Computer Interaction has been gaining momentum. Lately, there has been an upsurge in agent based applications in the form of intelligent personal assistants (also known as Chatbots) which make it easier for users to interact with digital services via a conversation, in the same way we talk to humans. In e- commerce, these assistants offer mainly text-based or speech based search capabilities. They can handle search for most products, but cannot handle search that is based on product features, for instance color or pattern of a T-shirt. Most of the times, it is difficult for users to define these characteristics while searching for a product. Furthermore, a growing number of consumers rely on social media to make a purchasing decision. They try to find out what is trending right now and look for similar items. This brings us the need of a virtual shopping assistant or a shopbot which recommends products based on an image of the product provided by a user. It will be designed to provide relevant responses to the user queries by performing image recognition. This report explains the proposed approach along with the implementation for the virtual shopping assistant