Smart entertainment - a critiquing based dialog system for eliciting user preferences and making recommendations

Abstract

We present a Critiquing based dialog system that can make media content recommendations to users by eliciting information through active exploration of user preferences for item attributes. The system and user communicate through a natural language mixed-initiative conversational interface in which the system guides the user to a specific choice. During the conversation, the system presents the user with several options and analyzes the responses or “critiques”. The system starts with general recommendations or relevant candidates and refines this as it learns more about user’s preferences in subsequent iterations. These choices made by the user and the textual feedback/reviews that can be optionally provided, is used to infer a user preference model for the item.