Personalization and the Conversational Web

Abstract

Hyper-personalization intends to maximize the opportunities a marketer has to tailor content that fits each and every customer’s wants and needs. Naturally, gathering and analyzing more data is the key to those opportunities. This is were the “Conversation Web” comes in, which in the near future is expected to transform to so much more than just conversational interfaces (chat-bots). In a truly Conversation Web, websites and users implicitly “discuss” in the form of clicks, mouse scrolls and movements, as well as page views and product purchases. Websites use this information for decoding user interests and profile and provide customized one-to-one services. In this work we proposed an integrated architecture for the conversational Web; consequently we propose a novel hybrid approach for recommendations using offline and online analysis, as well as we propose a novel personalized search strategy that takes into account the strict time performance limitations applied in e-commerce. We evaluate the proposed methods on three different datasets and we show that our personalized search approach provides considerably improvements in search results while being suitable for near real-time search in commercial environments. Regarding personalized recommendations, the proposed approach outperforms current state-of-art methods in small-medium datasets and improves performance in large datasets when combined with other methods.