The "Who is it?" Problem application for customizable web sites

Abstract

We introduce in this paper a problem only rarely taken under consideration in knowledge engineering: how to acquire the most information with a minimal associated cost. More precisely, the problem that we wish to address is the following: how to obtain the most information concerning an individual by begging him a limited number of questions. We refer to this problem as the "Who is it?" Problem in reference to the famous game of Hasbro for which the objective of the two players is exactly to solve this thorny issue. From a practical point of view, solving this problem may be extremely interesting in several fields and in particular in WWW related fields: customer/user profiling or clustering, web site personalization, creation of efficient questionnaires.