Interactive Assessment of User Preference Models: The Automated Travel Assistant

This paper presents the candidate/critique model of interactive problem solving, in which an automated problem solver communicates candidate solutions to the user and the user critiques those solutions. The system starts with minimal information about the user’s preferences, and preferences are elicited and inferred incrementally by analyzing the critiques. The system’s goal is to present “good” candidates to the user, but to do so it must learn as much as possible about his preferences in order to improve its choice of candidates in subsequent iterations. This system contrasts with traditional decision-analytic and planning frameworks in which a complete model is elicited beforehand or is constructed by a human expert. The paper presents the Automated Travel Assistant, an implemented prototype of the model that interactively builds flight itineraries using realtime airline information. The ATA is available on the World Wide Web and has had over 4000 users between May and October 1996.

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