30,991 research outputs found
A Personalized System for Conversational Recommendations
Searching for and making decisions about information is becoming increasingly
difficult as the amount of information and number of choices increases.
Recommendation systems help users find items of interest of a particular type,
such as movies or restaurants, but are still somewhat awkward to use. Our
solution is to take advantage of the complementary strengths of personalized
recommendation systems and dialogue systems, creating personalized aides. We
present a system -- the Adaptive Place Advisor -- that treats item selection as
an interactive, conversational process, with the program inquiring about item
attributes and the user responding. Individual, long-term user preferences are
unobtrusively obtained in the course of normal recommendation dialogues and
used to direct future conversations with the same user. We present a novel user
model that influences both item search and the questions asked during a
conversation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system in significantly
reducing the time and number of interactions required to find a satisfactory
item, as compared to a control group of users interacting with a non-adaptive
version of the system
Modeling social information skills
In a modern economy, the most important resource consists in\ud
human talent: competent, knowledgeable people. Locating the right person for\ud
the task is often a prerequisite to complex problem-solving, and experienced\ud
professionals possess the social skills required to find appropriate human\ud
expertise. These skills can be reproduced more and more with specific\ud
computer software, an approach defining the new field of social information\ud
retrieval. We will analyze the social skills involved and show how to model\ud
them on computer. Current methods will be described, notably information\ud
retrieval techniques and social network theory. A generic architecture and its\ud
functions will be outlined and compared with recent work. We will try in this\ud
way to estimate the perspectives of this recent domain
Search procedures revisited
Search Procedures reflects on a series of studies carried out over a four year period in the late 1970s. It was published at an interesting time for Information Retrieval. Written before Information Retrieval became synonymous with online information seeking it focuses on Information Retrieval within Public Libraries, then the major location for everyday information seeking. While many of his contemporaries focused on information seeking in academic or special library settings, Peter chose instead to focus a setting that was visited by a more diverse set of people with a broader range of information needs
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