Developing a Conversational Travel Advisor with ADVISOR SUITE

Due to the inherent complexity of building highly-interactive and personalized web applications, the development of a web-based travel advisory system can be a costly and time-consuming task. We see this as one of the major obstacles to a more widespread adoption of such systems in particular with respect to small and medium-sized companies and e-Tourism platforms. The goal of the ADVISOR SUITE project discussed in this paper is thus to provide an off-the-shelf framework and development environment that allows us to build intelligent and easy-to-maintain advisory applications in a cost-efficient way: The main pillars of the presented system are therefore an integrated graphical modelling-environment, the provision of different domain-independent recommendation algorithms, as well as model-based mechanisms to fully generate functional web applications based on declarative definitions in a central knowledge repository. The paper discusses the core concepts and main functionalities of the system by means of an example of an interactive travel advisor developed for an Austrian spa resort.

[1]  D. Sriram,et al.  AI in engineering , 1985, SGAR.

[2]  Daniel Mailharro,et al.  A classification and constraint-based framework for configuration , 1998, Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing.

[3]  Derek G. Bridge,et al.  Towards Conversational Recommender Systems: A Dialogue Grammar Approach , 2002, ECCBR Workshops.

[4]  Giuseppe Carenini,et al.  Towards more conversational and collaborative recommender systems , 2003, IUI '03.

[5]  Hannes Werthner,et al.  Intelligent Systems in Travel and Tourism , 2003, IJCAI.

[6]  Liliana Ardissono,et al.  A Framework for the Development of Personalized, Distributed Web-Based Configuration Systems , 2003, AI Mag..

[7]  Dietmar Jannach,et al.  A Knowledge-Based Framework for the Rapid Development of Conversational Recommenders , 2004, WISE.

[8]  Stanley Y. W. Su,et al.  Web Information Systems – WISE 2004 , 2004, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[9]  Francesco Ricci,et al.  Supporting Travel Decision Making Through Personalized Recommendation , 2004, Designing Personalized User Experiences in eCommerce.

[10]  Pat Langley,et al.  A Personalized System for Conversational Recommendations , 2011, J. Artif. Intell. Res..

[11]  Dietmar Jannach,et al.  Personalized user preference elicitation for e-services , 2005, 2005 IEEE International Conference on e-Technology, e-Commerce and e-Service.

[12]  D. Jannach,et al.  Finding Preferred Query Relaxations in Content-based Recommenders , 2006, 2006 3rd International IEEE Conference Intelligent Systems.

[13]  Dietmar Jannach,et al.  Persuasive Online-Selling in Quality and Taste Domains , 2006, EC-Web.

[14]  Gerhard Friedrich,et al.  An Integrated Environment for the Development of Knowledge-Based Recommender Applications , 2006, Int. J. Electron. Commer..

[15]  M Zanker,et al.  Knowledge-based composition of recommendations - Extended Abstract , 2006 .

[16]  Wolfram Höpken,et al.  etPlanner: An IT Framework for Comprehensive and Integrative Travel Guidance , 2006, ENTER.