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<Paper uid="H01-1012">
  <Title>A Conversational Interface for Online Shopping</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1. INTRODUCTION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Conversational interfaces allow users to interact with automated systems using speech or typed in text via &amp;quot;conversational dialog&amp;quot;.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> For the purposes of this paper, a conversational dialog consists of a sequence of interactions between a user and a system. The user input is interpreted in the context of previous user inputs in the current session and from previous sessions.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Conversational interfaces offer greater flexibility to users than menu-driven (i.e., directed-dialog) interfaces, where users navigate menus that have a rigid structure [5,4]. Conversational interfaces permit users to ask queries directly in their own words. Thus, users do not have to understand the terminology used by system designers to label hyperlinks on a website or internalize the hierarchical menus of a telephone system [3] or websites.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Recently, conversational interfaces for executing simple transactions and for finding information are proliferating [7,6]. In this paper, we present a conversational dialog system, Natural Language Assistant (or NLA), that helps users shop for notebook computers and discuss the results of user studies that we conducted with this system.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>