<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="H01-1012">
  <Title>A Conversational Interface for Online Shopping</Title>
  <Section position="5" start_page="4" end_page="4" type="evalu">
    <SectionTitle>
4. DISCUSSION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In this paper, we have presented a conversational dialog system for helping users shop for notebook computers. User studies comparing our conversational dialog system with a menu driven system have found that the conversational interface reduced the average number of clicks by 63% and the average interaction time by 33%. Based on our findings, it appears that for conversational systems like ours, the sophistication of dialog management and the actual human computer interface are more important than the complexity of the natural language processing technique used.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> This is especially true for web-based systems where user queries are often brief and shallow linguistic processing seems to be adequate. For web-based systems, integrating the conversational interface with other interfaces (like menu-driven and search-driven interfaces) for providing a complete and consistent user experience assumes greater importance.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2">  Many systems' fate has been decided not because they cannot handle complex linguistic constructions but because of the difficulties in porting such systems out of the research environments.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The user studies we conducted have highlighted several directions for further improvements for our system. We plan to modify our interface to integrate different styles of interaction (e.g., menus, search, browsing, etc.). We also intend to dynamically classify each user as belonging to one or more categories of computer shoppers (e.g., gamers, student users, home business users, etc.) based on all the user interactions so far. We can then tailor the whole interface to the perceived category including but not limited to the actual questions asked, the technical knowledge assumed by the system and the whole style of interaction.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Another area of potential improvement for the NLA is its inability to handle any meta-level queries about itself or any deeper questions about its domain (e.g., NLA currently can not properly handle the queries, &amp;quot;How can I add memory to this model?&amp;quot;or &amp;quot;What is DVD?&amp;quot;). Our long-term goal is to integrate different sources of back-end information (databases, text documents, etc.) and present users with an integrated, consistent conversational interface to it.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> We believe that conversational interfaces offer the ultimate kind of personalization. Personalization can be defined as the process of presenting each user of an automated system with an interface uniquely tailored to his/her preference of content and style of interaction. Thus, mixed initiative conversational interfaces are highly personalized since they allow users to interact with systems using the words they want, to fetch the content they want in the style they want. Users can converse with such systems by phrasing their initial queries at a right level of comfort to them (e.g., &amp;quot;Iam looking for a gift for my wife&amp;quot;or&amp;quot;I am looking for a fast computer with DVD under 1500 dollars&amp;quot;).</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>