The vocabulary problem in human-system communication
Communications of the ACM
Experiments in automatic statistical thesaurus construction
SIGIR '92 Proceedings of the 15th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
SIGIR '93 Proceedings of the 16th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
Data mining: practical machine learning tools and techniques with Java implementations
Data mining: practical machine learning tools and techniques with Java implementations
Improving the effectiveness of information retrieval with local context analysis
ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS)
Information Retrieval Systems: Theory and Implementation
Information Retrieval Systems: Theory and Implementation
Helping conversational agents to find informative responses: query expansion methods for chatterbots
Proceedings of the first international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems: part 2
User-Tailored Planning of Mixed Initiative Information-Seeking Dialogues
User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction
A personalized information search process based on dialoguing agents and user profiling
ECIR'03 Proceedings of the 25th European conference on IR research
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In e-commerce it is often crucial to provide customers a large choice of relevant offers. Users, however, seldom provides complete and comprehensive descriptions of their desires, therefore user interfaces are needed that can generate automatically expanded queries to the product database and proactively enrich the ongoing dialogue with recommendations of suitable products. Automatic query expansion is mostly based on thesaurus and/or user profiles. In e-commerce applications, specific thesauri reflecting the webstore's product categories are desirable. This work describes a method for the automatic construction of a thesaurus based on existing categories of documents. A clustering algorithm, the "Layer-Seeds method'', is introduced, which facilitates the automatic generation of thesaurus reflecting the specific vocabulary occurring in a given collection of documents. The clustering works on terms extracted from the documents in a certain category and organizes them in a tree-like hierarchical structure--a thesaurus. The thesaurus is then employed for automatic query expansion in an e-commerce application in order to obtain better results for product searching. Experiments yield evidence that a significant increase of user satisfaction is achieved.