CHAYANI: A Shopper's Assistant
S. Sen, P. Sarathi Dutta,, S. Debnath, · Journal of Intelligent Systems · 2005
Shopping on the Internet has become a convenient way of purchasing commodities of choice.A key contribution of agent technology will be to develop personal agents that can assist users by generating, filtering, collecting, or transforming information that is available on the Internet.We believe that knowledgeable agents can increase the productivity and satisfaction for online shoppers by suggesting query reformulations to obtain products and services of particular interest to the user.A consumer interested in a particular product class, e.g., a consumer electronic item, can use such an agent to locate a desired product fitting a specified budget from one of several online stores.Apart from finding good deals on a product, such a ''buyer's agent" can also suggest a higher quality alternatives for even a slightly higher price.We identify the types of query reformulation that will be particularly useful for online shoppers.We characterize the information requirements of a domain ontology that enable flexible and effective query reformulations.We also demonstrate the feasibility of this approach by example interactions with a shopper's assistant agent, CHAYANI, which we have developed for the consumer electronics domain.