An Adaptive Conversational Interface for Destination Advice

In this paper, we describe the Adaptive Place Advisor, a conversational interface designed to help users decide on a destination. We view the selection of destinations as an interactive process of constraint satisfaction, with the advisory system proposing attributes and the human responding. We further characterize this task in terms of heuristic search, which leads us to consider the system's representation of problem states, the operators it uses to generate those states, and the heuristics it invokes to select these operators. In addition, we report a graphical interface that supports this process for the specific task of recommending restaurants, as wellastwo methods for constructing user models from interaction traces. Wecontrast our approach to recommendation systems with the more common scheme of showing users a ranked list of items, but we also discuss related work on conversational systems. In closing, we present our plans to evaluate the Adaptive Place Advisor..